


Recalibration

by malfaisant



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-29
Updated: 2013-04-30
Packaged: 2017-11-06 06:33:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 46,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/415846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malfaisant/pseuds/malfaisant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A long, rambling <i>what-if</i> of Loki's scepter working the first time around, a string of bad nights when the nightmares were too close, and a second go at a relationship that might work if they just tried, and if they weren't both so good at self-sabotage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“How will your friends have time for me, when they’re so busy fighting you?”

Like many of the regrettable things that have happened in Tony's life, the scene played out in slow-motion, almost as if so he could later relive every second of it in clear detail (did Loki have powers like that? slowing down time? it would be just like him to have them and use them for the sheer purpose of gloating, the bastard). The scotch burned down his throat as the actual God of Chaos _what even is his life_ stalked towards him and alarm klaxons rang in his mind, but he wouldn't be Tony Stark if he had any self-preservation instincts, he was allergic to those—

But sometimes he did wish he listened to them more often—

Loki touched the sceptre to his chest, a centimetre above the arc reactor, a centimetre above where it would’ve been harmless and Tony would’ve brushed it off with a crude joke. Instead, there was a sharp needlepoint on his sternum, and cold, blue tendrils clutching at his heart, the same electric blue as his pupils.

It felt like being submerged in water—muffled, dull, he could just fall asleep—

Then a different memory of water surfaced, a metal drum and the dim lighting of a cave, wires crawling out of his chest, stagnant water filling his lungs past the point when he thought he’d black out, hands on the back of his neck, just that sensation, except it was his entire body screaming for air—

As quick as it began, it all stopped, and he heard a voice like a purr, distant and all-encompassing all at once. He nodded, and suddenly he was stepping back, arms outstretched and the Mark VII closing around him, joints whirring, locks clicking into place, this was armor, his armor, safe and close and familiar.

*

"Mr Stark?"

The first time Steve met Tony Stark, he was afraid he'd suddenly started seeing ghosts.

It had been 48 hours since he woke up to a brand new world—loud and full of lights, _Times Square had always been flashy but nothing like this,_ he remembered thinking wildly—and the fact that he was nearly seventy years into the future had yet to completely sink in.

Aside from the obvious, everything was just a bit…off. The SHIELD issue clothes they’d given him felt small and slightly uncomfortable, and he couldn’t help feeling a bit underdressed wearing just a shirt and trousers. The phone they’d given him (they told him the tiny piece of glass and plastic was a phone, _what_ ) felt unnecessarily fragile in his large hands. It was supposed to be the future, but everything just felt like cacophony and noise.

It was like the first few days right after he’d been injected with the serum, a stranger in his own skin.

They had told him his apartment in Brooklyn had been preserved, kept untouched, and the first thing he asked after he had calmed down was whether he could visit. Director Fury was hesitant to let him out into the world so soon after waking up, but he’d agreed, and sent Steve down to Brooklyn in a black towncar with ten agents as escort the very next day. His old place, as they explained on the way, had become a sort of pilgrimage spot for those who wished to pay their respects to the good Captain. Mostly old men, veterans from the war, or the grandchildren who grew up hearing stories of Steve’s bravery and daring.

Seeing the small shrine of letters and photos, an old wreath of flowers, set up to the side of the building’s front steps made him feel more like a relic than any of SHIELD’s cutting edge technologies ever did.

The apartment was surprisingly clean, though a bit dusty, and the place was obviously unlived in, with that definite air of absence and neglect. They were honest when they said that they’d left his things untouched. The arrangement of the furniture, his old radio, even the drawer where he kept his art supplies, though the paper had yellowed and the eraser crumbled when he picked it up—everything looked the same as when he’d last seen it, before he’d left for the USO tour to Europe, and he blinked. He touched a hand to his face and was surprised to see it come away damp with tears. He didn’t know how long he’d been crying, didn’t notice when he started to. This was his homecoming from the war, wasn't it? His first time back, he came back and they had won—

He gripped the back of a chair to steady himself, a dull hollowness gnawing at the centre of his chest. This was all he had to come back to, then? A country that had left him behind, and a handful of ghosts.

So when he had composed himself, and had taken the car back to SHIELD HQ, he had to shake his head to make sure none of those ghosts had followed him from the apartment.

The illusion lasted only a second. Tony was older than Howard had been when Steve flew the Skull’s plane into the Atlantic, and wasn't that a weird thought? This Stark had more lines on his face, and Howard was present in the way he held himself, that easy, confident grace that Steve could never emulate, before or after the serum.

His eyes, however, were different, far more expressive and with lashes like a dame’s.

He must've gotten his eyes from his mother, and Steve was suddenly saddened by that new thought, that he never got to meet his friend's wife.

"Captain," Tony said.

The rest of the meeting did not go as well.

*

"I did advise you to keep your old armor on. What use are you without it, Anthony Stark?" (That question's been asked before, many times.)

Loki took the drink out of Tony's hand as the Iron Man continued to assemble around him. He walked to the sofa, sat himself on the leather, and knocked the rest of the drink back in one go. The man might be insufferable, even taking into account that he was human, but he had to admit that Stark had good taste in alcohol. And he built such lovely toys.

"Is this not simpler indeed," Loki said, at first mostly to himself, and then, "and especially since you are infinitely more bearable in this manner. It's a shame to have lost Agent Barton. I could've started a collection, wouldn't you say?"

Not that he was expecting an answer. The armor finished assembly, though he kept the visor up for just a bit longer, taking in the blank expression of his newest tool. Subservience was a much better look on the man than his careless arrogance, and it was even more of a shame that it would soon be hidden behind the impassive faceplate of the Iron Man, but you couldn't have everything. Loki set the glass on the table and paused to briefly admire the sceptre. _Such a convenient device_ , he thought, and idly considered how he would go about creating a convincing enough counterfeit to return to Thanos in order to keep it for himself—but that was business he could contemplate later. At the moment, he had a planet to invade.

Loki stood and made his way onto the balcony, ensconced in harsh light as he summoned his own armor, gold and shimmering green materialising around him. Stark followed closely behind, obedient as a dog. They both looked up to the column of energy, the tesseract reaching towards the heavens, to where the portal should open at any second.

"You have kindly informed me how your precious Avengers are coming, so you may as well join their welcoming committee," Loki said, grinning as the sky was finally torn apart, and the first of the Chitauri emerged to rain fire on the city below. "And when they've come, why don't you start with the soldier?"

*

People screamed, and it grated on Tony's nerves. The Iron Man was designed for pinpoint operations, not wanton destruction on the scale that Loki's war preferred (Rhodey—no— _War Machine_ would've been better for that, Tony thought), which was why most of his attention was devoted to monitoring the HUD for the signature of an approaching quinjet. Still, Loki's done his research, Iron Man was a hero (nevermind what Steve had said), and a hero turning on his own people had a very definite appeal to it. It wasn't as showy and bombastic as the ugly-aliens-on-hoverbikes destroying the New York City skyline (and wasn’t that a change, Tony not being showy enough), but the small bullets of Iron Man's anti-personnel guns were ruthlessly accurate, hitting only every other person of a crowd, leaving the other half to scream and panic.

After all, they saw exactly who had fired at them.

People looked up as Iron Man flew alongside the invading Chitauri, _your allies_ , the voice whispered, and Tony knew there was something very wrong with that word, but whenever the thought threatened to crystallise into something more, it dissipated like smoke between his fingertips. Well, it probably wasn't all that important.

Iron Man surveyed the scene. The repulsors fired at the exposed struts of an overhang, then at a building's crucial support beam. He fired at the exposed gas tank of an overturned bus, already rigged to explode. He fired to the left of a crowded walkway, lead people right into the line of fire—mayhem working like clockwork. It was almost ironic, how chaos and logical thinking worked perfectly together.

“Target acquired, seventy meters ahead, building’s structural collapse imminent,” said JARVIS, and Tony wasn’t sure when he’d programmed calculated hesitation into the AI. “Sir, are you sure you should be—“

“Just fire the missile.”

 _You will know peace_ , someone had once said. One man saw enlightenment, science as an elegant, irrefutable truth. Another man saw a target, and with it the calm serenity of purpose, the comfort of a straightforward op, an arrow finding its mark.

Tony's heart was heavy with contentment, the same feeling of contentment that settled in his chest when he's tinkering in his workshop, and in the background, the soft glow of hologram schematics, Dummy whirring to grab a tool Tony had asked for ten minutes ago, JARVIS' programmed accent becoming more pronounced as he got more and more sarcastic. The hazy delirium of too many cups of coffee and too many lines of code, blurring together but still more simple than anything else in life. For all that he was a supposed genius, Tony was a mechanic at heart and he liked machines best because they were _simple_. They worked, they made sense, and when they didn't it was just an errant line of code somewhere, or crossed wires, nothing more complicated than hardware and circuitry involved. There was no debugging feature on feelings or people or relationships (and he knew that better than most people, because he couldn't say he's never tried, and that's the thing, wasn't it? his laundry-list of defects made him the human equivalent of the buggiest program ever, and he had no illusions about that). The rush when something worked out exactly per expectations, when the code compiled (and his code was always elegant, even at his most delirious), well, it's almost as good as an orgasm, and Tony’s an expert on those too.

He liked sex for much the same reasons as he liked machines. (They can work well together, but that's a digression.) He didn't give it much thought, it's probably something freudian or whatever and he was never much for navel-gazing, but the fact is, sex was simple, or it was the way he played it. A simple union of bodies, hands and mouths leaving marks on skin, gratification at its most distilled form, and that's where the _playboy_ part of ‘ _genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist_ ’ came in. The whole song-and-dance into bed was easy, once you figured it out, and someday if he got bored enough he could probably write an algorithm for it.

This thing with Pepper though, oh, let's not mention that, _what if he jinxed it_? (Tony hoped she wasn't watching the news.)

 _It's not important_ , the voice in his mind insisted, sounding a little irate. _You have your instructions_.

Right. Attack the city until the Avengers ( _Steve_ ) arrived. Simple.

A crowd rushed out of an office building, and Iron Man's targeting systems locked on for another round of fire, the whine of charging repulsors suddenly filling the air.

*

"Stark, what in god's name—"

The repulsor blast ricocheted off his shield to blow out the innocent lamppost to his left. Steve jumped off the roof of the police car and ducked behind an overturned car, realisation and dread settling in as a furnished blur of red and gold flew overhead. "Stark! Tony!"

So that was why Tony hadn’t responded when they’d flown the quinjet in, hadn’t gotten anything when Loki took down one of their wings and forced them to land in the square. Between the explosions and the panicking crowds, Steve hadn’t had time to worry about Tony, but this was much worse than he’d feared.

The sharp whine of the repulsors was what alerted him more than anything else, and Steve barely got out of the way before the car he was hiding behind exploded, rolling with less than his usual grace across the street to duck behind…another overturned car. He needed to come up with a better plan, and fast. He pressed the headset to his ear, trying not to breathe too loudly into the mike. "Hawkeye, Widow, Stark's been compromised. I repeat, Stark is currently a hostile."

"Shit, are you serious?" Clint replied on comm, and in the background Steve can hear the sound of a bowstring being pulled taut. "’Cause we didn't have enough problems before, is that it?"

“A blow to the head, Cap,” Natasha said, her voice punctuated by gunfire. “That’s how Hawkeye got out of it.”

“A _really_ hard hit,” Clint added.

He heard the sound of bullets firing, and Steve brought his shield up above his head, anticipating the tell-tale noise of deflected fire. Instead he heard the blast of jet boots, and shouting. The bottom of his stomach dropped as Steve realised what was happening.

A scream turned Steve's attention to his right, where a group of people were filing out of the bus. For a second, he made eye contact with a boy, couldn't be older than his late teens. There was a bloom of red on his chest, and a look of incomprehension on his face as he moved his gaze from Steve to his own bloodied hands, before he crumpled to the ground.

Without thinking Steve gave a shout and ran towards Iron Man, deflecting repulsor fire, before throwing his shield directly at the helmet. A dull metallic thunk told him that it had found its mark, and the armor shook its head as if in a daze, before he vaulted forward and caught the shield on its downward arc, slung it onto his back and ran as fast as he could down the street. He could feel the heat of an exploding rocket right at his heels and knew that Iron Man was following.

"He's—Iron Man is attacking civilians. I'm leading him away from the crowd down 59th. Hawkeye," Steve said into his comm, "do you think you have anything that can disable the armor?"

A pause before Clint replied, "Yeah, I think I got something. Just keep him occupied while I get into position."

That was easier said than done but, "Get here fast, would you?"

*

 _No one should be able to run that fast,_ Tony thought to himself as he flew after Captain America. He tried anticipating his trajectory, but Steve was unpredictable, turning in zigzags, leaping and jumping and swinging from lampposts like a particularly patriotic acrobat.

“Sir, my protocols are dictating me to intervene. I believe Sir has been compromised and should not be taking this course of action,” JARVIS interjected. Suddenly his arms were at his sides, systems shutting down, and he was landing on the street.

 _NO, that is not what you should be doing,_ a voiced hissed.

“Run-down base systems, disable JARVIS AI personality uplink, vocal recognition override code 429-7-Skynet-1,” Tony said without inflection.

The HUD wavered, a protesting “Sir—“ before it cut off and everything went dark. A second later, the display returned, visual capabilities restored, just in time to see Captain America coming towards him to punch him in the face.

Tony was thrown backwards into a car, _ow, how the fuck_ , before he tore off the crushed car door and threw it at Steve. Seriously, what was this guy’s deal, he was just trying to kill him, he should’ve died seventy years ago anyway.

 _God, he really hated this man_ , he told himself as he stalked towards him, firing shot after shot only for Steve to avoid it or deflect it with his shield. A good man, _a great man_ , his father had said. But, no, he was arrogant, pompous, self-righteous, disappointing.

_Or wasn’t it you that was the disappointment, Tony?_

Steve threw his shield at Tony, and wow, that one-trick pony had gotten old real fast, Tony stepping to the side to avoid it as it swept past his torso. He smirked to himself, before it was all ruined when the shield came from behind and hit the back of his neck. He fell forward to his knees, suddenly dizzy, and then Steve was there in front of him, bracing his hands on Tony’s shoulders to pull him to his feet, “Stark, are you okay?”

 _You idiot, you big idiot_ , Tony wanted to scream.

A gauntlet closed around Steve’s throat and Tony stood up, staring at the man as he held him in the air, grappling at Tony’s grip, gasping Tony’s name.

“Tony—Tony, you have to fight it—,” he choked out, his voice rasping.

_Yes, that’s it, Stark. The symbol of all your father’s accomplishments, his legacy, and all your shortcomings._

“Tony—“

Iron Man dug his fingers deeper into Steve’s throat.

*

To be honest, this part was familiar. The chaos of explosions, the sound of buildings collapsing around him, even the eerie blue glow of the enemies' guns—Steve could almost think it was just another HYDRA mission, still the same war, and that he hadn't been away for seventy years. But then he'd catch a glimpse of a familiar building, a landmark that had been there since his time, a street sign saying 50th and 7th, and he'd remember it was his city under attack, his home.

Tony—no, the Iron Man had stopped chasing him and made an unexpected landing, and that was another new thing too. No matter how advanced HYDRA's weapons were, they were nothing compared to Tony's armor, the starkest (ha _ha_ , Steve could almost hear Tony laughing at the unintended pun) example of the world of tomorrow. His flight as he came down was weird, and Steve wondered—hoped—if this was a sign that Tony was coming to his senses.

Still, it wouldn’t do to take chances. A blow to the head, was it? He dashed forward before Iron Man caught his bearings and landed his strongest punch on forehead of the helmet, sending him back into a car. Iron Man quickly recovered though, and yanked the car door to throw it at Steve. He ducked, and tried a second time, deliberately aiming for the building behind him to have the shield hit him on rebound.

Steve dashed forward as Tony fell to his knees, couldn’t help worrying if that was too hard and he’d hurt Tony too badly, surely that was enough. Without thinking, he ran forward and knelt in front of him, and—

 _That was not my best idea_ , he thought as metal fingers closed around his neck.

Steve scrabbled at the grip, and tried finding purchase on the ground but failing, the toes of his boots brushing the concrete. He gasped, the edges of his vision blurring, his pulse roaring in his ears—

Then, a bullet hit Iron Man from behind and made him turn around for a second, and in the distance Steve caught a glimpse of Natasha down the block, gun aimed at them both. Steve took that small distraction to bring down his forearm on Tony’s elbow, before pulling himself up to bring his knee to Tony’s face. Iron Man’s grip slackened, just enough for Steve to drop himself on the ground and aim a sweeping kick at his feet. Tony fell to the ground but quickly held his hands up, his palms aimed at Steve, who grabbed the shield just in time to block the shot.

The force of the repulsor fire at point-blank range sent Steve backward, and he somersaulted into the fall. A sharp sting on his knee, as additional repulsor fire grazed him. The volley had hit the damaged supports of a building entrance behind him, which gave a great heave as it collapsed in on itself.

This was all taking too long. He wasn't getting anywhere; his best hope was close combat, hand to hand, but Iron Man had varied his tactics, keeping out of his immediate range so that Steve could only duck as bullets rained from overhead. He looked at Tony, then at the squadron of Chitauri stalking towards them both, and knew he had to do something drastic fast.

He stood and jumped on the hood of the car, launching himself at Iron Man, holding his shield in front of him to impact with the back of the helmet. A dizzying sensation as they crashed together, and then Steve quickly locked his arms around Iron Man's neck in a chokehold, mostly futile what with the armor and all, but it threw Tony off-balance, judging from his suddenly erratic flight pattern, and he fired his repulsors in front of him to compensate for the added weight of Steve on his back. He did a violent spin in mid-air to shake him off, but Steve held on tight.

"Cap, I'm on your six. He's gonna smear you to the side of that building if you don't get off him fast," Clint said on comm.

Steve turned around, where he saw Clint taking aim from a window on the fourth floor of a building. Iron Man was speeding up, flying backwards, the concrete face of a wall suddenly looming in front of him. He climbed on Tony's shoulders and vaulted himself onto a building ledge, the wind knocked out of him where his torso hit the parapet. He pulled himself up to stand on the ledge while a buzzing noise sounded behind him, and he turned in time to see Iron Man freeze in mid-air, surrounded by electric sparks and an arrow sticking out of his back. Then he stilled, and dropped like a stone to the street below, crushing a car on his landing.

Steve went inside the building through a broken glass window and ran down the stairs, leaping down several steps at a time. "What d'you hit him with?"

"An EMP. SHIELD's been developing ways on how to disable the Iron Man armor in case Stark ever went rogue."

Steve pressed the comm to his ear and tightened his hold on his shield as he emerged from the building. "Cover me, I'm going to check his condition."

*

For some reason, he suddenly remembered the first time he’d met Steve.

Well, not the first time. _This was the guy my dad never shut up about_ , he’d told Bruce, but what he didn’t say was, this was the guy his dad told stories about when he was a kid, in kind, admiring tones, one of the few times he could remember his dad talking to him instead of berating him. So he asked his dad for story after story, just to hear him talk like that for a while longer. And when his dad had deemed him too old for fairy tales, Tony held on to Captain America because, well, his dad had given Cap to him, right? Cap was his now, to fight evil-doers and go on adventures with, just like the ones he had with Tony’s dad.

So yeah, Tony had felt like he’d known Steve Rogers since he was a kid. When he heard about what SHIELD fished out of the water, he had JARVIS hack into the SHIELD’s HQ in New York and play AC/DC on the intercoms until they let him see Steve, because _why_ was he finding out about what _his_ company’s arctic expedition found a full week after they got him from the ice, a full day after he’d woken up?

Fury called back an hour later, _Thunderstruck_ playing in the background, and told Tony he could see Steve, but if he ever pulled a stunt like that again, he would call in Natasha and have her maim him in the most colorful way she could come up with. Tony felt mildly impressed at how effective that threat was, but the trick worked, he was getting to meet _Captain America_.

“Captain Rogers is currently off-site, and should be back in 1900 hours,” Fury continued. “Try not to traumatise a historic national icon, will you?”

For one of the few times in his life, Tony had felt nervous. He kissed Pepper on the way out of the Tower, telling her he had a thing with some guy, had Happy drive him to Midtown and then flashed his consultant badge at the front desk, where a surly looking attendant had glared at him and led the way. Come on, some people just had no taste, AC/DC at full volume was practically a gift—

He turned the corner and blinked. The old newsreels, the vintage trading cards (Coulson wasn’t the only one who had a set), none of it prepared him for seeing the man in the flesh. Except…

Except this guy looked young, so painfully young, much younger than the image of the man Tony had built up in his head, the one he spent his entire childhood hero-worshipping. He looked up when Tony came in, a surprised expression on his face, and said, “Mr Stark.”

“Captain,” he replied.

Then Rogers smiled, wide and genuine, before, “So, they tell me you’re Howard’s kid?”

Tony—Tony couldn’t help it. He _bristled_. He’s had decades of getting used to people reacting that way, of people looking at him and seeing his father. Years of people ( _Obie_ ) telling him what Howard Stark had accomplished and how Tony fell short of those expectations. So what was he expecting? That Steve Rogers would know all that and treat him differently? 

( _B_ _ut Cap always knew how to make him feel better._ ) 

He hoped none of that showed on his face.

“Yep, and you’re the Star-Spangled Man with The Plan,” he said. “You’re much cuter than your file made you look.”

Rogers blushed. “I—thanks? Err, you’re also very handsome. You, I mean, you look a lot like your dad,” he finished lamely, looking a bit sheepish.

Tony rolled his eyes. “I thought the flirting would offend you enough to derail you.”

“What?”

“So you’re alright that I think you’re really cute?”

The man was still blushing, but he'd barrelled on. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Uhuh. Did they even know about homosexuality back in the 40s?”

Rogers’ eyes widened. “What—what does have to do with anything—”

“Have they given you a presentation on what’s considered socially acceptable in the 21st century yet?”

“No, they’ve been too busy trying to make sure I won’t have a breakdown first,” Rogers said. His tone had a hint of annoyance in it, and he continued, “derail me from what?”

Meanwhile Tony was trying (and failing) to remember all the reasons why he had set this meeting up. “Cap, I don’t actually like talking about my dad, or did they not have a note like that in my file?”

“You don’t like Howard?” asked Rogers, surprise evident in his voice, as if he couldn’t believe that his friend could have been an awful father. It made Tony angry, and yeah, that wasn’t fair to Rogers at all, but he just thought…

“If that surprises you, you knew a different guy than I did.”

Tony opened his mouth to say something else, before he stopped, and said, “Good meeting you, Cap.” Then he stormed out the door, and the last thing he saw as he left was a confused expression on Steve Rogers’ face.

*

**Experiencing catastrophic systems failure, initiating systems reboot.**

_Tony,_ a sing-song voice whispered in his head.

_nononogetoutgetoutgetoutgetOUT_

The whole world felt upside-down.

Creepy manic laughter. He could feel his skin crawl.

**Systems reboot in progress, 19 per cent.**

For a second his skull felt like splitting in two.

_getoutGETOUT_

It felt like a heavy, dank fog was lifting from his mind. Everything hurt, but the voice and the laughter had grown faint, and everything was so much more—

**Systems reboot in progress, 47 per cent.**

What had happened? The last thing he remembered was—

The last thing he remembered was a sharp point on his chest, and a sudden enveloping cold.

**Systems reboot in progress, 82 per cent. Restoring heads-up display.**

It was all suddenly brighter, numbers and data scrolling past him on the HUD.

"Stark!"

 **Systems reboot complete.** "Life support systems indicate that you are conscious, sir?"

"Yeah, JARVIS. Are—are you okay?" Tony remembered the last few hours like broken pieces of film, and shit, had he really done that to JARVIS? He had written that Skynet override half as a precaution but mostly as a joke, for fuck's sake.

"Sir’s override code was terminated in the system reboot and my uplink was properly restored.”

“What happened?” 

A pause, as though JARVIS was carefully considering the wording of his answer. “Sir was compromised. Captain Rogers should be able to explain in greater detail."

Without warning, his faceplate opened, and suddenly his field of vision was comprised entirely of blond hair and very, very blue eyes. He groaned.

"Tony!" Steve was kneeling in front of him, and he was lying on his back on the street, and wow, fuck, everything hurts.

(Everything was coming back. The memories were arranging and assembling themselves, slotting into place, and with each image that cleared, the more Tony wanted to return to not remembering.)

"Are you—is it you?" Steve asked. Cap looked a tad dishevelled, a bit worse for wear than when he'd seen him last on the Helicarrier.

"It feels like I got in a fist fight with my own brain." Tony sat up. He didn't look too hot himself, and his left-shoulder arsenal was completely spent. He tried hard not to think of the reason why. "How—how long was I under?"

Steve let out a relieved sigh. "Since the attack started. You’ve been out for ten minutes. How much do you remember?"

Tony looked at Steve, at the purpling bruises on his throat—"I remember enough," he replied, curbing his internal screaming long enough to reply, and hoped that Steve left it at that for now. He'd take look at what his feelings were doing later. "What d'you do to me?"

"Black Widow recommended hitting you on the head, so we dropped you seventeen stories from midair."

Despite everything, Tony couldn't help the small chuckle that escaped him. "Knew I could count on you to have my back."

"Cut the chatter guys, I can't cover you indefinitely," Clint said on the comm.

"D'you think you can fight?" Steve helped him to his feet and fixed a steely gaze on him, all resolve and unspoken questions.

_Blood, so much blood, and he didn't know how he'll ever wash it off._

_Do you trust yourself to fight?_ hung unasked in the air, but Tony nodded anyway. "Yeah, I can fight."

*

 _Can you fight_ , he asked Tony, though Steve already knew the answer, and he knew Tony would have to face a whole new host of demons, but he would just have to do it later. This was war and Steve had led people before, was familiar with the different ways people compartmentalised, closing off certain parts of themselves, like a tourniquet to staunch blood loss. To survive the now and deal with it later, in the unlikely chance there was a later.

For Tony, compartmentalising meant replacing the expression of despair (realisation) on his face with one of grim determination.

They stood back to back as a horde of Chitauri foot-soldiers swarmed them, Steve bashing one on the head with his shield and ducking as Tony shot repulsor fire over his shoulder. But for every one they incapacitated, there were three more firing at him and Tony, blue whizzing past his head by inches.

"Tony!" he shouted, braced himself and poised the shield in front of him, and Tony turned towards him and gave an infinitesimal nod. He aimed a continuous repulsor beam at the shield, and Steve turned, deflecting it to hit all the opponents in their immediate radius.

A roar directed both their attention skyward, where a huge… _thing_ flew out of the portal. God, he was going to have to give Fury another ten after all this was over. "Are you seeing this, Stark?"

Tony elbowed one of the Chitauri in the face before taking a pause, putting his faceplate up. "Seeing...still working on believing. Has Banner shown up? We need him if we're gonna win this."

Steve nodded, and didn't say that they needed Tony too. "No, but I'll keep you posted. You think you can distract that thing?"

The faceplate fell back down with a clunk. "Poke the giant space centipede, right, on it, Cap."

*

So they worked as a team, and Bruce showed up like Tony knew he would, and the team's capacity for destruction went up some several levels.

"Call it Cap," Tony said, and tried not to think how many of the bodies below were there courtesy of yours truly.

There was anger in his veins, both at himself and at Loki, _that little shit_ , and he directed it to newly spirited methods of destroying the enemy.

He flew in circles as aliens exploded around him, debris marking deep furrows in his armor (he doesn't even try to lie to himself that perhaps he was being more reckless than usual).

Then Fury's voice was in his ear, telling him about the nuke headed for New York, so he put his thrusters on full to meet it head-on and flew a nuclear bomb towards an alien portal.

"Stark, you know that's a one-way trip."

_Maybe—maybe that wasn't the point._

Tony didn't answer, told JARVIS not to bother calling Pepper because he didn't know if he could talk to her if she picked up, if he deserved to have her voice be the last thing he heard before his repulsor jets sputtered and died, and he fell, fell, fell—

It had to be at least some ways towards redemption if he managed to save the city from his father's creation (and at this he wasn't sure if he was talking about the bomb).


	2. Chapter 2

_I made it back_ , was the first thing that came to Tony’s mind. _Was that supposed to happen?_

Tony woke up in a hospital, feeling like one giant bruise. The first thing he registered after that was Pepper, sitting on a chair beside the foot of his bed, her head pillowed in her arms as she slept. He was glad this was the case, as it gave him the opportunity to compose himself. _D_ _on't remember yet, don't think about it—_

He sat up in bed, before leaning forward to brush Pepper's hair out her face.

"Tony," Pepper said, blinking sleep out of her eyes as she realised he was awake. Tony returned a weak smile.

"Hey, Pep."

"Oh, Tony." She rushed forward and embraced him, and for a moment, Tony was almost able to forget all the recent events that landed him in the hospital bed. _Don't think about it, not with Pepper here, not before you can get to the workshop—_

"What happened? How long have I been out?" Tony asked after a couple of moments had passed, careful to keep any sense of urgency from his voice. "I remember—"

 _I remember flying a nuke into an alien portal,_ he was going to say, before the absurdity of the sentence caught up with him and he stopped. He felt vaguely hysterical laughter bubble up the back of his throat, and was barely able to stop it, because Pepper wouldn't have taken it as a good sign. Anyway, did she even know about that? If she didn't, then Tony wouldn't be the one to tell her.

Considering he was alive, he supposed it was pretty reasonable to assume the city was safe, the aliens defeated, no one wanted his head on a plate (at least, not yet), but he didn't know what happened to anyone else, or how he was still alive.

Pepper smiled at him. "You won, Tony. The Avengers won, and everyone on the team is safe. And you've only been asleep for 10 hours." Then she frowned, as though thinking that his totally involuntary recuperation process was just being difficult, instead of being you know, involuntary. "You're not actually supposed to be awake yet."

"Well, you know. Superhero, superheroic recovery times," he said, shrugging. "It's kinda my thing now, we have a membership card and everything."

"As if. It's just your malformed sense of self-preservation acting up again," she replied. Now that he was more awake though, he could see the tense lines of her shoulders, the cautious way in which she held herself. It was the demeanour of someone who was trying to avoid something by hiding it behind a mask of levity; Tony knew, it's one of his tried-and-true tactics, deflection 101.

"Pepper, what's wrong?"

Her smile fell, her expression immediately sombre. She was never very much good at lying, not like Tony was.

"Tony," she started, "I just want you to know, no one thinks it's your fault."

Tony was silent. So much for no one wanting his head on a platter. The only surprising thing, he supposed, was that they waited long enough for him to wake up.

"How much do you know?"

"Agent Hill debriefed me when I landed in New York. We've been coordinating our PR strategies, making sure everyone knows that you—you weren't responsible for the things that happened."

Tony didn't say anything in reply.

"SHIELD came forward with all the information necessary for your protection. No one's going to bother us, for now," she continued, before a pause. "At least, not legally."

Fury sticking out his neck for him? Now _that_ was a surprise. "So there are perks to saving Manhattan from a nuke, who knew?" he said, his voice more bitter than he intended.

Pepper grabbed his hand and squeezed it in reassurance. "Tony, you saved the city. And whatever happened before, none of that was your fault."

"I know, just—let's talk about it later, okay?" said Tony, deciding to play the best card in his arsenal. "I need a bit of rest."

Pepper nodded, her hand still holding his.

*

Steve visited Tony late in the afternoon, a couple of hours after Pepper had left. She had stayed with him and they talked—about the company ("How's my company doing?" "You mean my company? It's doing great, actually."), about Rhodey's operation in Pakistan ("He's already on the first jet home to see you."), or about whether JARVIS was talking to him again ("Is that why he told me to tell you that he upgraded Dummy?" “ _He what_.”)—all the while very carefully avoiding Certain Topics, until she had to go to a press meeting. Before leaving, she took out one of SHIELD's collapsible tablets from her bag and set it on his lap with a sad smile.

Tony waited until the click of her heels had faded, then a couple more minutes after that, before attaching the glass screen and letting holograms of SHIELD's official report wash over him. Their greenish-blue glow mixed with the sunlight filtering in through the blinds, and he could hear the noise of hospital’s ambulances in the distance, constant and oddly calming. He knew he could hear them because New York was still in a state of emergency, but the sirens were better than the deathly quiet of his empty ward.

"Filter: Iron Man," he said, his voice echoing in the room.

"73 relevant items found," the computer replied in a bland voice that reminded Tony of how much he missed JARVIS and that he still needed to apologise to his AI properly. He clicked the link of the top search result, a newsreel.

" _Investigation on the extra-terrestrial attack that occurred early yesterday in New York City is still currently underway, but just as much scrutiny is being levied on the mysterious group known as the Avengers after disturbing reports have come to light regarding the actions of billionaire Tony Stark's Iron Man_..."

"... _received eyewitness testimonies and video footage of Iron Man during the attack as a hostile agent, with confirmed civilian casualties_..."

"... _confirmed reports of a nuclear missile launched on Manhattan and deflected by the Iron Man to detonate against the invading alien force_..."

"... _Stark Industries has declined to confirm whether it was indeed Mr Stark in the suit, and has released a blanket 'no comment' on any questions about the events in New York until their scheduled press conference later today_..."

 _Confirm, confirm, confirm._ Why couldn't they just wait 'til he woke up to ask him?

A knock on his door startled Tony out of his reverie, and he closed all the hologram windows with a swipe of his fingers on the glass monitor. Steve was standing at the doorway, an identical tablet in hand.

"I didn't know whether you were going to be awake, when I came by," Steve said, and walked in tentatively, as if he wasn't sure of his welcome.

"Hey, Cap," Tony said.

The serum must work better than Tony originally thought, because it had been less than a day and already the bruises on his neck were fading, just the merest suggestion of them still visible. Despite that, Tony tried, and still failed, to flinch at the sight of them. He cast his eyes elsewhere, because elsewhere was a safer bet, but especially when elsewhere looked like _that_.

Steve looked okay, Tony was relieved to see, and was in civvies. But jeez, who dressed him up? The guy looked like somebody's grandfather.

"How are you feeling, Tony?"

"Awesome. My brain feels like it wants to jump out of its skull. How's the rest of the team?"

Steve looked surprised, but answered anyway, and Tony was incredibly grateful that he didn't comment on why Tony was asking Steve when he had the briefing right in his lap. "We're all fine, and they've said they'll come see you after the press conference."

"Right, the press conference with my company. So how come you’re here?”

“Well, I did my piece already, so Ms Potts tagged me out, said I should come visit you. The conference should be over in a bit.”

“I intend to get out of here today, so if they want to come in and tell me how much they miss me, they better do it soon."

"But your injuries—"

"Aren't that bad, because I was wearing the most technologically advanced suit of armor in the world."

"That doesn't mean you should underestimate them."

"Alright, whatever you say, Capsicle," Tony said, neglecting to mention how he was already planning to file the discharge papers as soon as Steve left. "But what's happening with us, aside from the mountains of PR we have to do?"

"SHIELD's managing the information we're releasing on Loki and the Chitauri. And the Avengers are going public, with official government approval," he said. "Kind of hard not to after what happened."

Then Steve paused, before continuing. He had come to stand by the side of his bed, folder set on the chair behind him, his arms crossed across his chest as he all but loomed over Tony. "You're—Iron Man is okay. A lot might have changed since my time, but there's still no law on the books on what to do about alien mind control. But we've made sure everyone knows you weren't acting of your own free will. And they also know how you helped save the city."

"Fury kindly left a note for me here about that," Tony said, tapping the top of his computer, "saying that if they threw me under the bus, I can go public with how the US government would have nuked New York. So instead, we do a truce. I don't go to trial and they get to call it 'a coordinated action against the extra-terrestrial threat'. I mean, I guess that's true in a way, if a 2-minute warning counted as coordination."

Steve grimaced. "I don't like how we have to be so underhanded about all this."

"It makes sense. Public response will be nasty enough as is without throwing ‘Super Secret Spy Agency Almost Nuked New York’ into the mix. Or the whole debacle with me. Surprised I didn't wake up in detainment though." He put on his best thoughtful expression.

"They wanted to, initially, but we...refused. And Bruce was still the Hulk, so they weren't inclined to disagree. I gave testimony after that. We all did. We had to do the same for Hawkeye anyway, and Dr Selvig."

Tony laughed. "So you're the reason I didn't wake up in jail, huh?"

Steve blinked at him. "What do you mean?"

"Having Captain America and Friends vouch for me probably saved my ass?"

"You're innocent." He uncrossed his arms and looked Tony in the eye.

"Yeah, but there are people after me, you know, advocates for accountability or something."

"Is that what they're calling it?"

"I attacked New York City in broad daylight as Iron Man, with plenty of damages and witnesses and casualties," he said, his voice the most uninterested thing in the _whole_ world _._  Yep, all nonchalance here. "Maybe I should've invested in the whole secret-identity gig after all."

Steve shakes his head. "Tony, we both know they have no grounds calling for your arrest, or for confiscation of the Iron Man. Whatever you did under the influence of Loki's magic was not your fault."

Tony nodded, surprised not at the ferocity of Steve's righteous anger (because Steve's always been good at that that, Tony thinks it must have been one of the things enhanced by the serum), but that it was righteous anger on his behalf. His words weren't just platitudes to reassure Tony—Steve was sincerely angry that people were calling for Tony's punishment.

"What happened to pretending to be a hero, Rogers?" he said, before he could stop himself.

"I was wrong," Steve replied without pause or hesitation, his voice so sincere that it made Tony want to kick himself for bringing it up. "You're a hero, Tony, and I hope you'll forgive for taking so long to realise that."

"Christ, Rogers, I was trying to—it was a joke," Tony said. _No_ , he was not flustered.

"I mean it though," Steve said.

"I...okay." A beat. "You know, there's a good shawarma place downtown. I don't know what it is but I wanna try it. Assemble the team once I get out of here?"

Steve gave him an exasperated smile. "Sure, Tony."

*

Steve stayed with Tony and made small talk, and Tony was surprised to see that the guy was okay. So, they got off on the wrong foot, but Steve seemed to have gotten the memo on Tony's daddy issues and Tony managed not to be a complete asshole for more than a few sentences at a time.

The guy liked art, baseball, and his favorite thing about the future so far was the fact that less people smoked nowadays, due to many bad memories of cigarettes triggering his asthma from when he was a kid. Tony tried not to tease him too much about the Dodgers.

Bruce and Natasha came in a half-hour later to pay their greetings, and told them Hawkeye and Thor were on guard duty for Loki. Meanwhile, Selvig was currently building the machine for harnessing the tesseract to create a temporary transdimensional bridge. Tony immediately pounced on the latter and bombarded Bruce with questions, while Natasha and Steve talked about SHIELD business.

But they couldn't stay long, and soon had to leave for another meeting with Fury, because a congressman from New York just held a press conference calling for the Avengers to be held responsible for the damages incurred in the attack. Tony waved away their concerns and told them to go ("And then shawarma after," he'd said). Well, Bruce and Steve's concern. Natasha just told him to try not dying for a change, while they were away.

Then they left, and Tony was alone. He called for the nurse and had his discharge papers in order not fifteen minutes after everyone had gone, and he knew it would piss off Pepper but he couldn't stay here, in an empty ward under a false name that she and SHIELD had procured for him.

Tony sat up, and swung his legs to the side of his bed to stand. _Sirens in the distance, how much of it was his fault?_

Suddenly breathing became difficult, and he was overwhelmed by the phantom sensation of inhaling water instead of air. He imagined his lungs, the millions of tiny air sacs screaming for oxygen as he drowned sitting on a hospital bed. He tried to push air into his lungs but all he could hear were his desperate gasps and he knew that if he didn't do anything, he'd pass out.

He clamped down on it.

He just needed to get out of here, needed to do something with his hands. _To forget what those hands had done..._

When he'd gotten ahold of a bit of composure, he called for Happy to pick him up. He snuck out of the hospital with Happy’s help and against Happy's subdued protests, and was back at the Tower by late evening.

"Welcome home, sir," JARVIS said, and Tony took a deep breath—the computerised voice felt safe, familiar.

"Hey Jarv. Take the armor out of lockdown and put the schematics up. We have some repair work to do."

"Yes, sir."

This would do, for now.

*

Among the many faults of Tony Stark, stupidity was not one of them. That was probably debatable, of course, depending on who you asked, because Pepper would probably say that just because he was a genius doesn’t mean he wasn’t also an idiot sometimes, and Rhodey would definitely say that when God was handing out brains, Tony managed to grab every variation of _genius_ but forgot to grab common sense. But Tony insists, he’s not stupid, and he knew, perhaps still maybe only in the intellectual sense of knowing, that he couldn’t be held responsible for his actions while he was under the influence of Loki’s spell.

He was also not stupid enough to hate himself for things he knew he shouldn’t hate himself for—he had enough reasons, he didn’t—doesn't—need to fabricate more.

(It’s just something to add to the list of things he has to make up for.)

But his nightmares didn’t seem to have gotten that memo.

*

Tony planned spending all of the next day lying low in the workshop, away from Pepper's ire at leaving the hospital early, until Fury contacted him to say that since he's apparently fine enough to get out of the hospital, would he like to help Dr Banner and Dr Selvig finish the tesseract transporter, pretty please? Natasha showed up ten minutes later, hovering a quinjet above the helipad (seriously, how many of those things did SHIELD have?), and gave him a ride to the Helicarrier.

“Agent Romanov—well, actually, should I call you Natasha? Nat? ‘Tasha? I feel like being on the same superhero team thing calls for a first-name basis, don’t you think?” he said. He had the suitcase armor in hand, what with both the Mark VI and VII still out of commission, along with a laptop full of drafts for the repair of the Helicarrier that he planned to ply Fury with.

Natasha smirked at him, and said, “Natasha’s fine, but don’t push your luck, Stark. You don’t get to call me Nat until we go on a mission that involves cross-dressing and machine guns.”

“Tony, please." Then he pondered what she'd said for a second. "So…Barton?”

“Sapporo, Japan, ’05. Further details are classified.”

Well, that led to some interesting mental images. “I’m almost afraid to ask what calling you ‘Tasha would entail.”

“Use your imagination,” she said, and Tony hugged the armor slightly closer to himself.

They touched down on the Helicarrier, which was apparently camouflaged in the Lower New York Bay, right where the Hudson wasn’t quite the Atlantic yet.

Natasha led Tony down onto the mid-level floors of the Helicarrier, which was relatively untouched by the carnage of the past few days. She informed him along the way that Loki and the tesseract were being held off-site at an undisclosed location by Thor, Cap, and Hawkeye. The decision was apparently made by the Avengers, in case SHIELD got any more funny ideas about the cube, which got Tony thinking about how Natasha and Barton were handling the whole situation.

Well, they were adult master assassins who could make their own decisions. He probably didn’t have to worry about them.

Bruce and Selvig were hunched over a glass cylinder, calibrating the tesseract’s energy signature to mimic that of the Asgardian Bifrost using Jane Foster’s notes, when he arrived.

“Tony,” Bruce said, a small smile on his face. Tony grinned right back.

“Way to start the party without me. Now what do we have here?”

The machine was halfway finished when Tony got to the lab, which was a smaller version of the first one SHIELD had provided Bruce, but it was well-equipped enough, and with Tony there they managed to have a functioning prototype in half the time. Natasha came in with the cube in a briefcase not long after, and they had a properly-tested, final model by the end of the day.

Tony offered to keep the tesseract and the transporter at the tower, while Natasha contacted Clint to tell him they could arrange for the return trip to Asgard as soon as tomorrow.

They all met the next day, off in a sequestered area of Central Park, flanked on all sides by black cars and austere-looking SHIELD agents.

Thor and Loki arrived last, and Tony strode forward, the briefcase in hand, while Bruce and Selvig arranged the transporter.

Loki caught his eye, and underneath the muzzle and manacles, he knew that the man was smiling at him, and Tony had to the resist the urge to punch him.

He must have been more obvious about it than he thought, though, because he felt a hand on his shoulder, as if to hold him back. Tony turned around, and found himself face-to-face with Steve.

“Tony,” Steve said. 

“I’m alright, Cap,” Tony replied, looking back to Loki. He and Thor were now standing in front of each other, Thor holding out the transporter between them. They engaged the transporter with a click, and disappeared in a dazzling show of blue light, the spot where they stood suddenly empty.

Tony saw Barton, and recognised the same coiled anger in the way he stood, in the murderous glare aimed at where Loki had been, in the hand Natasha was resting on his lower back.

“I’m okay,” he said once more, for good measure.

*

The first one to move in was, of course, Bruce. The tower was still under renovation from the Chitauri’s attack on New York, but Tony had asked him anyway while they were working on the transporter.

“And this way, you can tell me how you want the layout of your lab to look, you know?”

Bruce smiled, looking somewhat overwhelmed at the offer, but he agreed to take one of the smaller bedrooms. Tony made more plans on how to pimp out the lab on the lowest residential floor to its fullest potential, but kept it to himself, so as not to scare the good doctor away.

JARVIS—JARVIS fucking loved Bruce, to the point where Tony was worried that his AI would run off with him to the sunset and leave Tony behind. Well, it made sense, because Bruce was like Tony, except polite and accommodating and just a lot less difficult in general, wore proper lab safety gear like Tony never did—okay, scratch that, JARVIS loved Bruce because aside from being a genius he wasn’t like Tony at all. When Tony had allayed his fears of betrayal to Bruce, Bruce just laughed, and JARVIS remained suspiciously quiet.

However, Tony didn’t get the actual idea to have everyone move in the tower until the time he came home with Bruce after they had sent Loki away. When he came home from the hospital, in a car with glass-tinted windows, he immediately had Happy drive into the garage and went straight to his workshop. This time, arriving in his sports car with the top down, he looked up from the driver’s seat, all the way up the dizzying height of the tower, to the single ‘A’ that remained of his last name.

It was a pretty quiet couple of weeks in the immediate aftermath of the attack for the Avengers, perhaps due to the fact that everyone else, including New York’s more villainous denizens, were all still reeling from ‘aliens exist, _what the fuck_ ’, but they soon got back to it, perhaps with more enthusiasm than sense.

The first Avengers mission after Loki was on a way smaller scale than Alien Invasion of Earth, and probably below their paygrade, but Fury had recommended coming in just to remind people that the Avengers were now a permanent fixture. A group that called themselves the Wrecking Crew had taken City Hall and was demanding ransom with, uh, enchanted construction tools? Steve, Tony and Natasha had answered the call to assemble, and as Captain America’s shield swooped in and took down the main leader of the group, who Tony had named Crowbar Guy, Tony would have felt sorry for them if he wasn’t so busy trying not to laugh.

The second mission was a lot more normal, a bank heist with some hostages, simple, _classic_ , and they would’ve left it entirely to the police if not for the fact that the robbers were sporting some uncharacteristically impressive weapons, which according to SHIELD intel were AIM-issue prototypes.

Third time around, it was some guy named Doom (and Tony has to shake his head at that, no creativity at all) and his army of robots chanting glory to his name. This was more their style, Tony thought, as he fought alongside the Hulk, who had grabbed two robots and smashed them together like cymbals.

It didn’t escape Tony’s notice that the calibre of their opponents were increasing, but if he were being honest, he would admit he didn’t mind. Most important was that it kept him busy, on top of the rebuilding efforts of the city that he and his company were helping with. Stark Industries had thrown their full backing on the reconstruction and recovery of New York City, and a special subsidiary of the Maria Stark Foundation was created specifically for victims of Loki’s attack.

And if Tony saw a couple of people flinch at his approach every time he touched down to defeat some villain or the other, he brushed it off, and blew apart some Doombots to pieces. It was oddly soothing.

Despite the growing frequency of their missions, they hadn't assembled as a complete team since the first attack. SHIELD often had Natasha, Clint or Steve on some mission or the other, and Thor wasn't yet back on Earth. But weird things were popping up more and more frequently, meaning they were going to have to alter their routine, somewhat. It was soon after the sixth mission that it became obvious that it would be easier to have all the Avengers in one place when the call came to assemble, what with the fact that something always seemed to have it in for New York, and having Hulk and Iron Man as the first on the scene wasn’t always the best call.

The decision to have the Avengers move in the tower was finalised when Thor returned, a month to the day since Loki's attack, having managed to create a stable, miniature Bifrost through the power of the tesseract at Asgard’s end, and the combined efforts of Selvig and Foster on Earth.

Why no one had just listened to Tony when he'd first suggested it, he had no clue, because the whole thing was Tony’s idea, and all his ideas were awesome.

The Tower became more crowded when the rest of the team moved in. Well, for a certain value of moved in, because half the team already lived there half the time even before that. And the tower certainly didn’t feel any smaller, considering the fact that everyone had a floor of their own, but it did feel livelier now that it wasn’t just Tony, Pepper and Bruce in the evenings.

Thor had laughed good-naturedly when Tony told him he had the topmost floor whenever he was on Midgard, so in case he needed to summon a little lightning to smite some puny mortal or whatever it was demigods did for fun it didn’t bother the rest of the tower. Clint, who turned out to be a lot less broody than he looked, especially off-duty, let out a whoop when Tony told him about the move (“So I get to live in some swanky rich apartment? _Awesome_.”), while Natasha just shrugged, and came in the very next day with only a small duffel bag. Tony couldn’t decide whether it was just his imagination or not, but he swore Natasha’s bag made the same jangling noise as that of a bag full of sharp knives.

Steve was the last one of them to move in. Initially, he balked at the idea of having an entire floor of the tower to himself, and Tony had to argue him into leaving his lonely apartment in Brooklyn by saying that he still had to use the common areas like the living room and kitchen, and that the gym on his floor was open for everyone’s use, not just Steve’s (it was mostly true; the gym on Steve’s floor was the biggest and the most well-equipped—he just didn’t need to know about the smaller workout rooms on Clint and Natasha’s floors).

Tony sometimes wondered if it was a bad decision, because suddenly the tower was full of people who didn’t keep normal sleeping hours, and when Tony would come up to the kitchen from his workshop in the sub-level floors to coffee himself back to life, Steve would be at the table, frowning at him, because Steve woke up disgustingly early. Or, Natasha and Clint would take turns trying to induce Tony into a heart attack by means of being _fucking ninjas_ and creeping up behind him on his way to the coffee maker, and seriously, why didn’t Steve nag at _them_? Bruce was okay because he was normal and spoke science with him, but everyone else was crazy, and Tony had tripped on Mjolnir in the dark more times than he can count.

He still spent long nights in the workshop, and Steve or Pepper would come down to remind him to eat and that scotch didn’t have any nutritional value ( _liars_ ) whenever he got past the 12-hour mark.

It was safe, and more comfortable than Tony thought it had any right to be, even with the fact that at any given time something was attacking New York, or that in their downtime someone on the team was likely to be away on some death-defying SHIELD mission, or just the simple truth that it was a group of dysfunctional people that shouldn’t work together, let alone work together _well_ , but did so anyway.

It was enough, more than enough for now, because he's not alone, and if anything ever went wrong, if he couldn't trust himself, they could stop him. Tony could manage, with this.

(If the property damage bill for the tower was a lot higher as a result of housing more than its quota of incredibly destructive people, well, Pepper turned a blind eye to it.)

And that, children, was the story of how _Stark Tower_ became _The Avengers Tower_.

*

Tony functions, and maybe he’s even happy, but he doesn’t notice how he’s wearing himself thin. He doesn’t notice as he tries to convince himself that what he has is enough to cope with what he's dealing with, because he wasn’t dealing with anything, nope, no issues here, apart from the usual, and for the most part he succeeds.

The problem is that everyone else noticed. Pepper, especially, noticed.

*

The conversation in which he told Pepper how Coulson—how Phil had died was not the worst conversation he’d ever had his entire life, but it was up there. In the top 5, at least.

Pepper was so strong, but Tony still marvelled at her strength whenever it hit home just how much she’s going through, most of the time on his behalf. She’d already heard the news as part of the briefing with Agent Hill, but she had asked him what he knew about it anyway, the first time they were alone together in the tower since he snuck out of the hospital. Bruce was still the only other person living there, huddled down in his brand new lab, and Tony and Pepper sat together on the couch, and Tony couldn’t even begin to guess at what she was thinking about before she spoke.

“They didn’t tell me anything else, just that he was—killed in action,” started Pepper. Her voice was steady, almost toneless. Tony paused, and answered as best he could.

She didn’t cry, when Tony told her that Phil had died fighting Loki, or when he told her how Fury had shown them the blood-stained cards on the table.

“What a waste, you know? It was a good set too, almost as good as mine,” Tony said, managing to coax a smile out of Pepper. She linked their fingers together in lieu of a reply, and Tony didn’t know why at the time but he thought there was something incredibly foreboding in the gesture.

He held her closer, and her hair smelled like the citrus-scented shampoo she used. She didn’t ask him about anything else, not the mind control, not the stunt with the bomb and the portal, just buried her face in his neck, long after he stopped talking, until she fell asleep lying next to him. He paused, before taking her carefully in his arms and setting her in bed, where she stirred, but didn’t wake up.

Tony stood, before walking out of the room, back down to the workshop. He got the feeling that she wasn’t asking for herself anyway.

*

He saw Loki's pointed smirk, right before they put the muzzle on him, and he's gagged, he shouldn't be able to hear that voice again in his mind but he could, deep and dark and persuasive—

Screaming, still the screaming. _It wasn't me—_

_The smartest man, they say, desperate for redemption, to wash the blood from his hands. Legacy. This is your legacy, Anthony Stark. Your hands weren’t meant to do anything but destroy, and your greatest creation, the one which was supposed to make up for everything else, was nothing more than a particularly effective gun._

_—wasn'tmewasn'tmewasn'tme—_

Ashes and sackcloth and the ozone smell of repulsor fire— _what was the bodycount this time, Stark?_

_it WASN'T ME—_

Tony shot upright, suddenly awake, his hair clinging to his forehead damp with sweat. _It’s been more a month,_ he thought furiously, clenching his fists, his nails digging crescents to his palms. But the dreams came to him like clockwork, never leaving him alone for more than a few nights at a time. He took deep gulps of air, trying to steady his breathing, but each lungful felt heavy and tainted, and his heart was still racing too fast, memories still too vivid, a voice still echoing in his ears. He pinched the bridge of his nose and waited until he felt like he could breathe properly without breaking into heaving sobs. The space next to him was empty. Pepper had taken the jet to California, to oversee the construction of Stark Tower II (or Potts Tower, he had to ask Pep if she wanted the tower in Palo Alto named after her).

 _Thank god for small miracles,_ Tony thought. _At least she wasn't here to see this._

"JARVIS, time?"

"4:47 AM, sir. Do you require any assistance?" Maybe Tony was still a bit hazy from the nightmares, but the computer program sounded worried.

He groaned, plopping his head back onto the pillows. Almost 5 in the morning—too late to go back to sleep but too early for anything else. "Just start the coffee maker, would you?"

After several minutes of trying and failing to go back to sleep anyway, Tony stood up and made his way to the bathroom. By the time he got to the kitchen, the sky outside had changed from deep black to blue. He walked towards where the coffee maker was gurgling, rubbing at his eyes.

A chuckle from across the table. It took a while for Tony to register what that meant. Oh. There was another person already here? "Steve?"

"Good morning, Tony," Steve said, looking far too awake for the time of morning it was, dressed in sweatpants and a hoodie, a newspaper and a glass of orange juice laid out in front of him. "I was wondering when you were going to notice I was here.” He blinked. “Isn't this a bit early for you?"

Tony swallowed his original response ( _tell him about the nightmares, Tony_ ) and delayed answering by taking a deep gulp of coffee. Then he smiled, and said, "What can I say, Cap? You're an inspiration for healthier living."

“Going by your appearance, I don't seem to make an effective inspiration,” said Steve.

“Yeah, you’re right. You’re like an anti-inspiration, ya’know, like why even bother trying when there’s people like you and Thor running around making everyone feel bad.”

“It’s not like I do that on purpose.”

Tony gave a laugh, which turned into a hacking cough, because, _ha_ , drinking coffee while laughing, who would’ve thought?

Steve’s expression turned worried. "Seriously, are you sure you're okay?" he asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine Cap, never been better.” That got him an eyebrow raise, because yeah, Tony wasn't exactly the portrait of health at the moment, with his pallid complexion and the bags underneath his eyes. Tony winced, guessing he hadn't come off as smooth as he hoped, but he figured he could chalk it up to the fact that it was an ungodly hour of the morning and he’d just finished choking on his first cup of coffee, right?

"Okay, so I had a bit of trouble sleeping," he said (boy, did he have a talent for understatement, but anything to get Steve off his back), "but it's not like I keep anything close to a regular sleep schedule anyway."

He could tell from Steve’s expression that he wasn’t going to let up any time soon, though. "Well, you're not wrong about that," he replied. Tony was looking into the dark depths of his coffee, maybe, just maybe to avoid his gaze, but he could _feel_ the disapproving frown Steve was directing his way. He looked up and, yep, there it was, his body language clearly broadcasting disapproval and worry. He stood up and then suddenly he was in front of Tony, his hands resting on Tony's shoulders, before smiling, and asking, "Why don't you go on a run with me?"

Tony, flustered from how close Steve was (purely out of reasons of personal space, surely), took a second to register the question. Then he laughed. "What, and die from exhaustion?"

He could see it now, him trailing behind Steve, out of breath, hands resting on his knees, and Steve would be jogging back to him, barely winded with a radiant smile on his face (radiant smile? where the fuck did _that_ come from?). "I'd look stupid next to you."

Steve smiled brightly (oh, guess that's where). "Come on, old man. Just a couple rounds around the block. It would be good for you."

"It would be like that story with the tortoise and the hare, except the hare is on speed and the tortoise had its legs amputated."

"I'll go slow?" _Oh no_ , his eyes were so earnest.

"That...is what she said, and no, I know you don't get that reference." Probably for the best, because if he started blushing right now, Tony didn't know if he'd be able to remember why jogging with Captain America was a bad, bad idea, for both his health and ego.

But Steve seemed undeterred, his puppy-dog stare firmly in place. "Come on, maybe you just need a bit of fresh air."

"I have work to do?"

"We'll be back before when you usually wake up," Steve said wryly. His expression, however, remained the same. Resolve...wavering... _stay strong, Stark..._

A little more than half an hour later saw Tony in the park, out of breath and hands resting on his knees, and Steve jogging in place beside him, that goofy grin on his goofy, stupid face, and what was Tony thinking? It was the worst of worst ideas, of course everything went exactly as expected. "How the fuck—you can at least breathe a little harder, soften the blow a bit," he said, and Steve laughed.

"I guess we could both use a breather," he said, and that was such an obvious lie, but Tony let himself be sat down on a nearby bench anyway. He brushed his hair from his face, his hand coming away damp with sweat, as he waited for his breathing to even out.

But every breath he gasped into his lungs felt clean and untainted, the morning sun chasing away the chill in his chest. (He couldn't hear that whispering voice, he was breathing too loudly.) Tony grinned to himself.

"You could do a lap around the island if you want. I'm sure I'll still be here by the time you're done."

Steve sat back, a small smile still on his face. An easy silence descended upon them, punctuated only by Tony's slightly embarrassed panting. Then, Steve spoke. "The city doesn't look all that different than it used to, if I leave early enough." A beat. "If I run fast enough too, everything blurs by and it's easy to pretend."

"What do you miss the most?" Tony surprised himself by asking.

Steve paused, looking contemplative. "The noises," he said. "Those you can't really ignore, no matter how fast you run. I used to be able to tell what part of the city I was in from the yells of the street vendors, or at least what part of Brooklyn. A lot's changed since then," he said, shrugging, "and it's not all bad. Just different."

Tony looked at Steve, whose only sign of exertion was the slight pink in his cheeks. Steve turned to him, that smile still on his face, and sometimes it hit Tony just how much Steve had lost, and he felt winded for reasons completely unrelated to their morning run. A slight ache in his chest, and Tony doesn't know what happened, he used to not be able to stand this guy, and now...

They waited a couple more minutes in which neither of them spoke, before Tony finally stood up and said, "Okay, old man, race you back to the tower?"

Tony thought he’d ask Steve if they could stick to sparring next time.

*

As soon as they touched down on the tower platform, Steve released his grip from Tony’s shoulder and stepped off his foot to stand directly in front of him, before he could start to walk away. In the armor, they were roughly the same height, looking at each other with their eyes level. “I’m not done talking to you, Tony. What the hell did you think you were doing back there?”

“Uh, saving our collective asses? Or did you not see the bright red bomb counting down to detonation in the middle of the street? Is your eyesight going bad in your old age?”

“We had time, we had a plan, and if you had waited for Hawkeye to arrive with the charges instead of going ahead on your own—“

“I knew I could disable to bomb, okay? I had a plan, I did what I needed to do—“

Steve grabbed his shoulders, almost shouting. “Stark, collapsing a building _on top of yourself_ to confine the blast radius is not a plan—“

“You don’t get to explain the concept of acceptable risks to me, _Rogers_. I saw an out and I took it, it worked, so get off my case,” Tony replied, his volume matching Steve’s pitch for pitch.

“You could have died. Actually, you almost did die!”

“But I _didn’t_ , so I don’t really see the point of this argument.” Tony jerked away from Steve’s grip, and made for the elevator. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in the workshop.”

Steve made to follow him, but felt a hand grab his forearm. He turned to see Bruce shake his head at him, a sad smile on his face. “He’s probably already had JARVIS initiate lockdown, Cap. You’re better off leaving him alone before you confront him again.”

The elevator doors closed. Steve gritted his teeth as he looked down at the floor, and tried not to punch a hole in the wall in frustration.

*

Steve Rogers was an observant man, even before the serum, because it was a necessity for anyone who wanted to be an artist, and Steve thought that he was at least a relatively decent artist. After he’d had a bit more time to acclimate, just a bit more time to reconcile himself with everything, his anger and resentment had softened to a dull roar, still there but no longer as overwhelming as it had been back when he was destroying half a dozen punching bags late into the night.

He was Captain America, and the obsolescence he’d initially felt had faded, because the troubles of this world really weren’t much different from his own, and in his more cynical moods he’d say it hardly changed at all, but that didn’t mean he wanted to help any less. If they needed Captain America, he could give them Captain America. It was Steve Rogers that he wasn’t sure belonged anywhere.

So Steve accepted his new reality, and the new people that comprised it. In the tower he had a home, much more so than the apartment in Brooklyn, empty save for dust and old memories. And his relationship with the Avengers, well, it was young and new, but he could call them friends, if not yet family—it was the uniquely close bonds of those who fought alongside each other, like him and the Howling Commandos during the war, and Steve thought it should be okay to take refuge in this small degree of familiarity.

Thor was the same fish out-of-water that Steve was, but took his curiosity in stride and asked questions in a booming voice. Clint showed him how to work with more advanced firearms, and how to refine his aim, even if Steve still preferred the shield over any other weapon. Natasha kept him on his toes, sparred with him; he had foolishly hesitated the first time (he didn’t know why, he'd  _seen_ her in action), but he quickly learned his lesson as she managed to pin him to the mat three times their first session, efficient and ruthless.

Bruce mostly kept to himself down in the lab, and there was still a subtle tension between them whenever they interacted, the successful trial and the cautionary tale, but Bruce was a kind man, and they would sit together in the kitchen sometimes, when neither of them could sleep. Bruce drank his tea and Steve would make small talk, often asking about the advancements in science that had been made since his time. Sometimes Tony would join them.

And then there was Tony himself. Well, he’d grossly misjudged him, for one, because at first he couldn’t see past the surface, and thought Tony Stark was all the shallow glitz and arrogance that characterised this new century. Resentment clouded his judgement, more so with Tony than anything else, because he was Howard’s son, and of all people could have helped him, could've anchored him to the present without forcing him to let go of the past. If Steve had been his usual observant self, he’d have realised from the start that Tony was not his father, that that was an unfair burden on him. He should've seen through the front, because no coward, no truly selfish man could have done what Tony did, do what he does.

So Steve had resolved to look, _really_ look, and this time he saw a grease-streaked face and the calluses of a man who worked with his hands. Tony talked with his hands, which Steve noticed the first time he’d gone down to the workshop after Tony had been down there for ten straight hours, Chinese take-out in hand, and convinced JARVIS to let him in.

Tony had looked surprised, but took the food and ate with gusto. He liked eating just fine, just needed reminders amidst the tangle of wires and circuit boards. As they ate, Steve decided to ask him just how JARVIS worked exactly, and Tony grinned, before promptly giving Steve a crash course in computational principles of robotics and natural language processing. Steve nodded along, most of the concepts going over his head and understandably so, because from what he'd come to understand, Tony's stuff was cutting-edge, even for this century, and Tony didn’t really know how to simplify. But by end of it though, Steve felt as if he’d learned something, the essentials of how AIs worked—at least now JARVIS was no longer just the voice in the ceiling that woke him up for his morning run.

Tony’s expression was bright, untempered joy clear on his face as he explained the basics of machine learning, and how he’d had to write a brand new programming language before he could develop JARVIS’ algorithms. Steve’s hand itched for a pencil and his sketchbook.

But Steve also saw the dark circles underneath his eyes, like bruises, and slumped shoulders that spoke of bone-deep exhaustion. He saw anger and coldness and fear simmering just beneath the surface, that saw its outlet in invention and battle.

On the field, he saw what he would have originally thought was overconfidence but realised to be recklessness, a distinct carelessness for his own well-being, and when he confronted Tony about it, the jagged-edged walls that they’d started with immediately went up again, hackles raised, volatile, rough. They would brush each other wrong until the next mission, when they would reconcile in the way they stood back to back, flowing into each other’s movements, fighting seamlessly as a single unstoppable force. It was an unspoken apology from both sides, but then the next mission would come, and the cycle would start over again, because Steve couldn’t hold back—he’d stand in the way as much as he could as Tony deliberately ran against a wall, over and over.

Steve saw laugh lines, and fake smiles, and uncertainty on Tony’s face whenever he thought no one was looking. A quiet desperation in the stolen glances he directed at Pepper.

He saw friction and distance and looming heartache, but he didn’t know what to do about that.

*

"Pep, please, I can't."

He knew all about coping mechanisms, coping mechanisms were friends near and dear to Tony Stark's heart. He also knew, though perhaps not to the same degree of expertise, about the stages of grief. When his parents died, his only reaction, Edwin Jarvis had told him, was blank surprise.

He had been at college when Jarvis called him through the phone, the Starktech prototype that Tony had helped design sliding out of his grasp at the news. A couple of hours passed, and when the shock had worn off enough for basic function, systems back online (safe mode only), Tony picked up the phone from the floor and called Jarvis back, telling him in a steady voice that he'll be on the next plane to New York.

He couldn't even do grief right, since he seemed to be perpetually stuck on anger.

Since he was very young, no one really knew what to do with Tony. Tony never had friends, not really, but they all loved him, they were all nervous about him. He always had too many ideas, and adults bristled at him because they knew that this boy was quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) evaluating them, and found them wanting. Everything about him was too much: too observant, too charismatic, too smart by half for the company he was forced to content himself with. He was sent off to boarding school, then to MIT at 15, and who thought that was a good idea?

He rarely saw his father, and his mother loved him, and taught him how to dance with a girl and how to fake a smile convincingly, and his robots, they loved him too, he built them for that.

There was one time when he was 22, and Obie had conned him into seeing a therapist, who after a session had explained to him that his “promiscuous sexuality was a grieving mechanism for his lost father figure.” It took a while for Tony to stop laughing, because his shrink had just called him a slut with daddy issues, and the look on Rhodey’s face when Tony had told him was completely worth it.

But the whole point of it all was, Tony knew coping mechanisms, and he knew grief, and he knew denial when he saw it, in the set of Pepper's jaw, the sadness in her eyes as she looked at him and wondered how one person could be so broken. _I’m unfixable,_ he wanted to say to her, to the concern in her eyes, oddly reminiscent of Steve’s anger and worry after every mission (and part of him wondered the reason for that, wondered if maybe it was because he didn't trust Tony to do anything right).

 _Are those bullet holes?_ she’d asked him once, her voice heavy with fear and disbelief. And she couldn't stand idly by as he tried to destroy/rebuild/redeem himself through overwork, burying himself in lines of code, and the insomnia of too much caffeine and alcohol in his bloodstream.

"Tony, please, I can’t do this anymore," she said, and Tony didn’t have it in him to stop her, because since when has he ever been able to save anything when it counted?

(At his most honest moments—in the brief seconds between his persistent nightmares and full wakefulness—he admits that he's scared, in case the voice returned, so he flinches away even if he doesn't want to, because he knows Pepper's all the best parts of him and he can't help it. He lets her go even if he doesn’t want to.)

So Tony knew grief, and Tony knew denial, and he didn't see it coming until it had fallen apart.


	3. Chapter 3

“ _You know that’s a one-way trip,_ ” Steve remembered saying, remembered not getting an answer. He’d already had this conversation before, but he never imagined how different it would be to be on the opposite end, an altogether novel type of pain. But then again, it shouldn’t feel like such a stranger to him by now. He’s had a whole lifetime to become familiar with people leaving him behind.

Steve remembered looking up at the gaping hole in the sky, a swirling void of space and darkness where there should’ve have been a patch of blue, and waited for a sign, a small speck of red and gold.

Moments crept by, each second infinitely prolonged, and he exchanged a look with Thor, an expression of dread and resignation on the other man’s face that must’ve reflected his own. His voice catches on the order to close the portal, the two words catching in his throat. The portal grew smaller and smaller—

He remembered relief surge through him when he saw Tony fall from the portal, falling, falling—

He remembered a snowy ravine as the railing failed and the train sped on, his hand outstretched, reaching, futile, when Tony showed no signs of slowing down—

A blur of green interrupted his line of sight, and suddenly the Hulk had landed beside them to put Tony on the ground. Steve snatched the faceplate off and put his face close, trying to hear if he was still breathing. But the arc reactor was flickering weakly and Tony remained eerily still, not stirring even when the Hulk gave a loud, terrible roar, before collapsing to the ground and transforming back into Bruce Banner.

Thor stepped forward and caught Bruce as he fell to his knees. Steve sat back on his heels, his hand still resting on the arc reactor, the circle of light flickering on and off, before—

“Captain Rogers, I can confirm that Mr Stark is alive,” a calm, accented voice said. The glow of the arc reactor was still dim and feeble, but it had steadied.

“Who… who am I speaking to, exactly?” Steve replied, almost startled into falling backwards. He caught his balance and leaned forward, resting on his knees. The voice was definitely coming from the suit.

“I am JARVIS, a computerised intelligence that helps Mr Stark run the Iron Man. Mr Stark requires immediate medical attention, but the armor will have to be removed.”

“Well, can you remove it?”

“I shall require a command to do so, and seeing as Mr Stark is unconscious, my protocols dictate that I turn to the nearest ally to provide the override code.”

Steve frowned. “But Tony didn’t give me any codes.”

A pause, as if the computer was considering its options. “In lieu of an override code, your rank and army serial number will suffice for authentication of your identity as Steven Rogers.”

“Rank; Captain. Serial number; 54985870.”

The armor started to disassemble around Tony, clasps and joints unlatching around his arms and legs, chestplate retracting, and without the bulk of the Iron Man, Tony looked incredibly small.

“Please lift Mr Stark from the armor,” the voice—no, JARVIS said. Steve complied, lifting Tony into his arms as the Iron Man folded in on itself into a compact frame the height and width of an average-sized man. Steve switched the channel on comm and contacted Fury, requesting a medical team to be sent their way.

“He’ll want to keep the armor away from people,” Bruce said, sounding slightly out of breath. “Keep it away from people who might want to take it while he’s unconscious.”

“Is there anywhere safe to keep it?” Steve asked. Looking down at the limp form in his arms, he could just make out the slight rise and fall of his chest in slow, shallow breaths. He pressed two fingers to the side of Tony’s neck, and found a weak pulse.

“Return the Iron Man to the tower. I can keep the armor under lockdown until Mr Stark returns to us,” JARVIS answered.

Thor nodded sternly. “We will take the armor with us when we come up to face my brother,” he said. “Loki is defeated, but he might yet have a few tricks left in his arsenal.”

“I dunno, I think he’s pretty well down for the count. I might’ve—had something to do with that,” Bruce said.

The sound of sirens rang in the distance. “Widow, Hawkeye, do you copy that? Rendezvous at the top floor of Stark Tower.”

Someone groaned on the comm in reply, as if still slowly coming to. “I’ll be there in a sec. I’m in some building on 49th.” Then, a pause. “God, I hope the elevators are still working.”

“I’m already up here, Cap,” Natasha said.

“Alright, Thor and Banner are on their way. I’m staying down here with Tony until the medics arrive.”

Thor picked up the armor and carried it under his arm, while Bruce stood up beside him, holding onto the waistband of what remained of his trousers. With a nod at Steve, they set off in the direction of Stark Tower on foot.

Steve remembered setting Tony on the ground, carefully cradling his head in his lap as he waited for help to arrive.

*

Pepper left, and Tony couldn't blame her, not at all. Without her, he’s an absolute mess, even more so than before, his heart in fractures, but he keeps going, because it’s the only thing he knows how to do. Keep going, keep building, build machines and circuits and tall, sturdy walls around the breaks. Before, his outlets had been working and drinking and fucking, but heartache had left an awful taste in his mouth for that last option, so he concentrated on the first two.

Pepper wasn’t going to leave his life, not completely, because she was a better CEO than Tony ever was and it was her company now as much as it was his, and because they were each other’s closest friend before they were anything else. But she had left the tower, now infinitely emptier than before.

Tony looked down the bottom of a tumbler of scotch and was tempted to shake it like a magic eight ball, hoping for a yes or no answer to suddenly emerge from its amber depths. _I do believe in Jack Daniels, I do, I do._

He won’t ask her to come back, he can’t. (It’s better off this way, anyway.)

The bed in his bedroom was untouched for days at a time. He went to business meetings he would’ve skipped before, and was first at the scene for every call to assemble. Tony built and dismantled, and the Mark IX plans were already halfway done, with thrusters and repulsors half their original weight with twice the output strength, a new lightweight tensile alloy for a greater range of joint movement, an experimental prototype arc reactor with faster cycles per second to access higher power levels—

(“Perhaps too fast, sir,” JARVIS said. “Current level projections with the Mark IX reactor predict health complications from the estimated additional strain on your cardiovascular muscles, at 79% probability. In addition, there are projections of flight instability at speeds exceeding 60 mph, at 76% probability.”

“So I either get a heart attack or explode in midair?”

“Or both, sir—a 56% probability,” replied JARVIS flatly. Tony laughed.)

It was a cloud hanging over his head, all their heads, and he’s more awful than usual, more insufferable, and everyone gave his sincere, cruel smiles and sharp tongue a wide berth. Everyone except for Steve, but to think that anything as insignificant as Tony’s petty moods and heightened callousness would be enough to drive him away from prying was foolish thinking. He came down to the workshop, bringing food most of the time, and Tony couldn’t lock him out, because he’d sit outside the workshop doors and wait until Tony let him in.

Well, Tony had locked him out that one time, right after his break-up with Pepper, because what was it to him if Steve couldn’t take a hint? He could sit his stubborn, star-spangled ass out there and Tony would forget all about it once the work started.

Hours passed before he opened the door, and Steve stumbled backwards from where he’d been sitting against the door onto the workshop floor, blinking sleep out of his eyes as he looked up at Tony.

Tony’s an awful person, but contrary to popular belief, there were limits to how much of an asshole he could be. He took the cold takeout from Steve’s hands and stomped back to the workshop bench, the door left open. He heard the shuffle of footsteps as Steve followed behind him.

It started like that, and Tony should’ve known that that one moment of weakness would come back to bite him, because now when Steve came down the door was never locked for long. Steve would sit on the other end of the bench and eat his half of the food, if he brought some—sometimes making small talk, sometimes just sitting there, as though Tony was pleasant company—while Tony did his best impression of a not-particularly friendly brick wall.

But Steve wasn’t always around, and there came an afternoon when it was just Tony and Natasha in the tower together while he was off doing Captain American-y things. When Tony pushed a modified pair of Widow’s Bite gauntlets across the kitchen table to Natasha over breakfast, she stared at him, and asked, “What if I liked the old ones?”

“These are better. Longer distance, automatic targeting relays, the works,” Tony said. Natasha clipped one of them over her wrist, looking contemplative.

“They’re worried, you know. Steve might have probably slipped a sedative in your coffee by now, if he weren’t so noble,” she said, a slight hint of distaste at the last word.

“And you’re not worried?” Tony said, pushing the buttons on the coffeemaker. He hoped that the gurgling noises of the espresso being made would drown out the rest of the conversation, but unfortunately, _he_ made the coffeemaker, and so it ran smooth and perfect and quiet, like all his tech. Sometimes being brilliant was such a pain.

“I’ve seen you like this before. I’m waiting to see if you’ll snap out of it like last time.” Natasha steepled her fingers in front of her, her elbows resting on the table. “But just remember, Cap may have qualms about slipping things into your drink, but I have no such reservations.”

Tony shook his head. Of course that was how Natasha showed concern.

The coffee finished dripping, the mug filled to the brim. He doesn’t really remember what number cup of coffee this was. Whatever. He raised the cup at Natasha’s direction, and said, “Well, thanks for the head’s up.”

He could feel Natasha’s eyes on the back of his head as he turned to the doorway and went back to the workshop.

He did tell them, he didn’t play well with others. Other people were unpredictable, unknown variables, and Tony couldn’t always read what they planned to do. So when they were called to Battery Park the next day to put down a legion of upgraded Doombots, Tony didn’t bank on Natasha pushing him out of the way, because _what the fuck?_ He was in a high-tech suit of armor while all she wore was a leather catsuit, he _purposefully_ did not jump out of the way because the Iron Man could take it and he would’ve had a clearer shot if he stayed in position—and then he saw the metal capsule they’d fired at her, and that she’d deflected with the brand new gauntlets he’d given her.

“Why did you do that?” Tony asked angrily as he grabbed her, wrapped an arm around her waist and flew them both to the sidewalk, out of range of where the fighting was thickest.

“It was an EMP, Iron Man. It would’ve taken you right out of the game.” The arm she’d used to block the projectile was bent at a weird angle, but it was the hint of a grimace on her face that clued him in on how much pain she was in.

She raised her uninjured arm forward and blew the head off the nearest Doombot that turned direction towards them. “You can thank me later.”

Tony gritted his teeth, and flew away to cover the rest of the Avengers. Explosions, heroics, this was their life now, and pretty soon there was nothing left of the robots aside from scrapheaps and malfunctioning speakers still chanting “Glory to Doom!” In the distance, Steve was helping a recently de-Hulked Bruce to his feet, a fresh set of clothes in his hands.

“Natasha!” Clint ran forward to where she was huddled in the back of an ambulance, a SHIELD paramedic arranging a splint for her left forearm. Tony was standing to the side, his faceplate up as he tried not to look as guilty as he felt.

“I’m fine, Clint. It’ll heal."

Clint turned to Tony, his brows furrowed. “You know, Iron Man, there’s this thing called evading, you might want to look into it.”

“I have an EMP disruptor relay built in my chestplate since the last time you took me out, okay? I would’ve been fine,” Tony said, though he wasn’t sure that would’ve been the case.

Clint snorted, as if sensing his doubts, and said, “You don’t know that. SHIELD’s EMP was designed to incapacitate you, not kill you. Wanna bet on whether Doom’s wouldn’t have fried you along with your tin can?”

“I’ll take my odds, Barton.”

“Is this about Potts? Or Loki? Because I swear, Stark, if you’re going to continue to be a liability to the team—“

“Uh uh, no way you’re benching me—Thor’s off-planet and unless you want your only other heavy-hitter besides the Hulk to take his toys and go home, no way is the guy with a bow and arrow benching me—“

“Fuck, Tony, this is not about _you_ , because I get the whole self-destructive shtick you’ve got going on, I get that that’s your thing, but you’re not the only one here who’s been fucked with in the head, and if you’re too busy trying to off yourself that you forget to cover your teammates’ back—“

“Hawkeye, that’s enough!” Natasha interrupted. “Leave the lecture to Cap. Clean-up’s here, so let’s just get back to the tower for the debriefing.”

“Whatever, yay, go team,” Tony muttered, before he turned on his thrusters and flew away. Mere minutes passed before he touched down on the landing pad and removed his armor. He paused, before heading towards the direction of the elevator doors. Taking refuge in the workshop—how predictable was he?

Tony clenched his fist as he remembered Clint’s words, because Clint understood, Tony knew he had that same voice whispering in his head. But what Tony didn’t know was how the man moved himself through it, through the paralysing fear of hurting the people closest to him—instead, Clint Barton still joked, and went through missions with the same ruthless efficiency, and his arrows always shot straight.

*

Bruce came in a couple of hours later, when Tony was halfway through his first bottle of wine, and tinkering with the workshop’s mainframe computer. “You missed the debriefing.”

“Pass me that socket wrench besides you,” Tony said.

“You know, if there’s anyone in the world that knows what you’re going through, it’s gotta be someone on this team,” Bruce said. He grabbed the wrench and tossed it from one hand to the other, before holding it out to Tony. Tony took the wrench and held it in his mouth as he soldered two wires together.

"It's terrifying, isn't it?" Bruce said in reply to his stubborn silence, "to be reminded of how you can have absolutely no control over anything?"

Tony knew what Bruce was trying to say, because even before Loki's fucking jedi mindtrick fucked him over, he’d already had a number of unhealthy things in common with Bruce; if anyone else aside from Tony knew how to eat himself up with self-loathing and regret, it was Bruce Banner. How someone could have very vocal inner demons, to be an object of fear and distrust—that was a variation on a familiar theme for Tony Stark. But what Loki did to him—that was different.

Clint had said it right. He was unmade, violated, the very worst fears he had about himself confirmed, in cellphone footage and body counts.

Tony took the ratchet out of his mouth, and unscrewed the bolts of the console panel. "It makes me fucking angry."

Bruce laughed.

*

Steve’s been in a war, had had to comfort soldiers, especially the newer recruits, who shot down enemy combatants and felt the impact of their own bullets as surely as their targets did. The confused amalgam of guilt and fear and the realisation that they were fighting people, as real and made of flesh and blood as they were.

The world was different now, but only slightly—the spectrum was a lot broader, a lot of it less black and white, _they didn’t say what we lost_ , he’d said to Fury, and Steve still hadn’t figured it all out. The situation with Tony was just one more thing on top of it all, but this time he’s at a lost as to how to help him.

Tony’s been down in the workshop since they returned from the mission. Bruce came up from the basement and when Steve had asked how he was, Bruce only shook his head and smiled sadly.

Clint laughed, cruel and full of self-deprecation, when Steve had asked him what had happened. “I played the ‘Be-Tony-Stark’s-Psychiatrist’ game. The entire team seemed to be playing it, and I felt a bit left out.”

Steve frowned. “Maybe if you told him how you deal with it, how you cope—“

"What makes you think I’m in any better a position, Cap? The only difference between me and Stark is that I have training for this sort of thing."

Perhaps the worst part of it all was that Steve knew exactly what he was talking about. _Cauterise the wound, staunch the bleeding,_ but Tony didn’t know how to do that.

 _We are not soldiers_ , Tony had told him. And he was right. Tony Stark, genius-billionaire-playboy-philanthropist, was not a soldier—he was a civilian, albeit with a high-tech suit of armor, but a civilian nonetheless. He wasn’t like Clint, or even like Steve, and the crushing weight of his problems was never a burden he was meant to bear.

*

Steve went down to the workshop to find Tony huddled on the floor next to You and Dummy. Parts and pieces of his disassembled chest piece and left gauntlet lay scattered around him, but Tony wasn’t doing anything, just sitting and staring dejectedly at the screwdriver and the bottle of alcohol he was holding in his hands.

“JARVIS, I thought I told you not to let anyone else in while I was working,” Tony said, not looking up, his voice slurring slightly.

“I apologise for misinterpreting the parameters of the order. I let Captain Rogers in as Sir did not seem to be working at the current time.”

 “Misinterpret my ass, you have the best processing algorithms ever, okay? I know because I wrote them,” he said, sounding annoyed. “You’re just a big traitor who likes being mean to me.”

“Well, at least you programmed something to look out for you,” Steve said as he approached and sat down next to Tony, who pointedly turned away from him.

“I deny all accusations,” JARVIS calmly replied. Tony glared at the ceiling. Steve took the opportunity to remove the bottle from Tony’s hands, and it must’ve been a sign of how drunk the man was that he didn’t put up much resistance. Or maybe it was just that the bottle was already mostly empty, judging by its weight.

“I didn’t program him to do that,” Tony said, turning the glare to Steve. “I programmed JARVIS to be awesome, and betraying me is not awesome. In fact, I’m gonna fix him right now.”

He quickly stood up, a determined expression on his face, before stumbling on his feet, the alcohol apparently kicking in at the sudden movement. Steve stood up to steady him before he fell back to the floor, a hand on each arm so that they faced each other.

“I—the floor was nice, maybe I’ll fix him back down there,” Tony said. Then, “Hey, Cap, your face is really close, you know that?”

“Are you sure you should be messing with JARVIS’ programming while you’re this drunk?”

“M’not drunk.”

At this distance, Steve could smell the sweat and grease and alcohol on him. He could feel the slight shaking in his shoulders, the tiredness that radiated from him in waves. He could feel Tony's hands gripping the front of his shirt, as though to keep himself standing.

“This isn’t just about Pepper, is it?” Steve said. “You know, you’re not the only person in this tower who has nightmares.”

When Tony didn’t answer, Steve went on, saying, “People seem to forget, or maybe it’s just hard for them to comprehend, but the war was just barely yesterday for me. SHIELD does what it can, getting me back into the world, but none of them understand just how _close_ it is for me. They just want me to move on, so I can be Captain America.”

He moved his arms around Tony in a loose embrace, a rough approximation of a hug. “When I close my eyes and dream, sometimes I see Bucky falling down the ravine, or, or hear Peggy’s voice on the intercom. Sometimes it’s just the water and I’m drowning, and I feel really cold—“

Tony shook in his arms, and growled, “Why are you telling me all this?”

Steve closed his eyes. “Because I wanted someone else to know.”

“Do you want to know what my nightmares are about, Steve?” Tony took a step back, looking down to the floor. “They’re about that voice in the back of my head, telling me how it was my fault, and it’s right. It _was_ my fault. I can blame Loki or magic, but it was my fucking fault. I knew Loki could take over people’s minds and control them, we had intel on that power. So I was just fucking careless when I let him do that to me—“

“Tony—“

Tony turned his head up to look Steve in the eyes. “I was an idiot, I was too arrogant, and people are dead because of the mistakes I’ve made and this,” he said, and gestured to the workshop, arms outstretched, “is the only way I know to make amends.”

Steve remained silent, waiting for Tony to finish, but Tony was done, too busy holding back tears to say anything more coherent.

“Tell me how I can help, Tony.” _Please_.

Maybe it was Steve’s voice, maybe it was just the weight of the day’s exhaustion finally hitting home, but Tony stilled, before deflating, the anger suddenly draining out of his body to be replaced with resignation. Tony leaned forward and rested his forehead on Steve’s shoulder.

“I just, I need to get away from the tower, Cap. Somewhere else,” Tony muttered, his face still hidden. “Maybe I could take the jet, if she’s not using it. Maybe Venice, she doesn’t like Venice.”

“Tony, I—,“ Steve started, before realising he didn’t have a clue what to say. So they stood there in silence, huddling closer than they might’ve had they both been completely sober, Dummy whirring in the background as it (he?) put away the remnants of the armor on the floor.

“Do you really want to get away?”

*

Steve lead him to one of the cars and sat him down in the front passenger seat, leaning across him to buckle his seatbelt, and Tony tried not to miss the warmth of close contact too obviously when he moved away.

They were in one of those nondescript black cars that SHIELD had provided in case someone on the team needed to head out in something less conspicuous than a bright red sports car. Tony was too drunk to keep track of where they were going as Steve drove ( _wait, since when could Steve drive?_ he thought blearily), only just sober enough to determine that they were still in the city, brownstones and traffic lights and the nightscape of Manhattan passing by.

The short car ride didn’t do much to clear his head, and he was only a bit less drunk but a lot more sleepy when they stopped in front of an old apartment building. Steve went to Tony’s side and helped him to his feet, slinging an arm under his shoulder as they walked up the steps. Tony nuzzled his neck with the careless affection of the hopelessly drunk.

“Where are we, Cap?” Tony asked.

“Brooklyn,” said Steve, taking them up a flight of stairs, the wooden steps creaking beneath their combined weight.

“Why Brooklyn?”

“It was the only 'away' I could think of that didn’t involve flying a plane.”

“I have a plane. Where would you have taken me?”

They came to a stop in front of a door with a tarnished doorknob and age-worn paintwork, and Steve opened the door one-handed to reveal a sparsely decorated room. The old-fashioned furniture, like the radio on the spindly-legged table or the dated upholstery of the sofa, clashed with the few modern amenities, obviously recent additions—a fridge, a coffeemaker, a small television in the corner of the living room.

“I don’t know,” Steve answered, as he closed the door behind them. “Before I shipped out, I've never set foot more than 20 miles outta New York. I mean, I toured for the USO, I went to every major city in America, but all I ever saw of them were what I could see from the window of my hotel room. So, maybe I would take you to one of the safe-houses we stayed in during the war. There was this one, a small cottage right outside Alsace. I don’t know if it’s still there but—it was next to this huge empty field, full of flowers. It was…peaceful.”

Tony didn’t know what to say to that, and he suspected he wouldn’t even if he were the most sober man in the world. Steve walked them to the living room and sat him down on the sofa. He let his head loll on the back of the couch, while Steve stood up and went to the kitchen.

The sound of a running faucet, the soft tinkling sound of glasses, and ten seconds later Steve was back with a glass of water and a wastebasket. Tony felt the opposite end of the sofa dip as Steve sat next to him, and put the water in his hands. Tony took a sip and made a face, before setting the glass on the table.

“This isn’t vodka.”

“Did you really think I was going to give you more alcohol?”

Tony didn’t, not really, but they did say hope springs eternal. “Maybe I was thinking you’d find it in your heart to be compassionate and give me vodka.”

“Yeah,” said Steve. “That sounds just like me.”

Tony slumped deeper into the couch, and rested his head on Steve’s shoulder, because he didn’t seem to mind and Tony could blame it all on the alcohol. Besides, Steve really did smell very nice.

“You smell really nice. When did you learn to drive modern cars?” Okay, so his brain-to-mouth filters were no longer working (although he could think of a few people who would refute their existence altogether).

Steve laughed. “Thank you, and SHIELD taught me the second week from when I woke up. They’re not all that different, you know.”

“Well, sorry, my brain just divides the entirety of recorded human history into 'before' and 'after' the internet. Anything B.I. just kind of blurs together with the, uh, invention of the wheel.” At this point, Tony’s eyes had closed, and he could feel just the barest hint of a smile on his face, because he was drunk and rambling stupid things while cuddling with Captain America on his couch.

“That was just slightly before my time, I’m afraid,” said Steve.

“Your time… it was barely five months ago, for you,” he said, his voice barely a whisper, barely awake. This felt safe, and comforting, with none of the cold and the numbness that haunted either of their dreams. “Does it get better?”

“It does,” Steve answered after a pause, but Tony was already breathing softly beside him, the alcohol in his veins having lulled him into a dreamless sleep. His expression was calm, and in this light, the circles under his eyes weren’t as obvious, the lines in his face less pronounced. He didn’t see Steve’s tired, fond smile, nor hear Steve as he said to himself, “And I think I know the reason why.”

*

They did missions, and the days passed like the pages of a comic book, suiting up and defeating supervillains on a regular basis. Tony still holed himself up in the workshop, but more often than not he opts for a glass of water instead of whiskey, and his lockdown codes don’t shut people out for more than 3 hours at a time.

“Hey, Nat, can you pass the jam?” Steve said. It was one of those rare mornings where no one was away on some mission somewhere, and there wasn’t anything attacking New York. Then again, it was still early. Steve caught the jar of strawberry preserve that Natasha threw at him without looking up from his newspaper.

Tony paused, a spoonful of cereal halfway to his mouth. “Wait, _Nat_? When did you—“

“Three weeks ago, that mission in Madripoor that Fury sent me and Steve on,” Natasha answered.

 _That_ made Steve look up from his newspaper, and he turned to Natasha, his face having turned an alarming shade of red. “Why are you talking to him about that?”

“He wanted to know why you can call me Nat and he still can’t.” Natasha shrugged, and took a bite of her toast.

“Okay, okay, I have got to hear this story.” Tony nudged his chair closer to Natasha and rested his chin on his hands. “Storytime, please?”

“It involved a peacock-feather fan and some rouge lipstick.”

“Are we talking about the Madripoor mission?” Clint said as he walked in the kitchen and sat next to Natasha.

“What the hell, was I the only one who wasn’t in on this?” Tony said indignantly. “Are you telling me neither of you guys took _pictures_?”

“I wasn’t on the actual mission, but ’Tasha showed me the mission reports afterwards.” Then he turned to Steve, and smirked. “I never did remember to tell you, but you pulled off the blue eye-shadow really well.”

“It was classified,” Steve hissed.

“Nat called me in as a consultant agent on the case, so I have proper clearance. But that’s all I’ll tell Stark about Madripoor, if it makes you feel any better,” he said to Steve, who didn’t look all that reassured.

“Why is all the good stuff classified?” Tony asked.

“We take mission integrity seriously, don’t we, Nat?” Clint said, elbowing Natasha, who just rolled her eyes.

Tony raised an eyebrow. “’Nat’, Barton?”

“Sapporo, ’05,” he said, fondly. “Good times. Also classified. I’m sure Fury will send you on one of those sorts of missions sometime. If you’re lucky it might even be with Steve.”

“Alright, I’m going down to gym,” Steve said to no one in particular.

“You guys are no fun,” Tony huffed, and resolved to hack into SHIELD’s mission history reports the next time he’s around headquarters.

*

It’s not that Tony had been avoiding Pepper since they broke up—well, fine, he had been avoiding her, just for the fact that it was simpler that way and hurt a lot less. But he knew it wasn’t feasible, because they owned the same company and went to the same meetings and led the same employees, so it wasn’t something he committed himself to. But this time, siting across a long table during a video conference with Fujikawa Industries, Tony didn’t feel that oppressive tension that had come to inhabit any room they both occupied at the same time.

The video conference ended, the rest of the room filed out, and Tony waited for every last board member to leave before touching Pepper on the arm. Pepper levelled him with a blank-yet-wary stare. She was holding her files and the clipboard in front her, hugging them to her chest, in case they could act as a shield against whatever Tony was planning on doing now.

“Hey, Pep,” he started. “How’ve you been?”

Pepper blinked, before giving a small smile. “Nothing much, Tony. Well, General Counsel has been bugging me to deal with the potential patent lawsuits Apple’s been threatening to bring to the table if the deal with Fujikawa goes through,” she said. “But that’s not what you wanted to hear about, is it?”

“You… I think that was actually deliberate, how you took the least interesting words I could think of and arranged them in the way that they’d make the least interesting sentence possible.”

“What did you want, Tony?” she said. Her tone was that familiar mix of fondness and exasperation, which Tony had always found heartbreaking in a way he could never articulate.

Tony scratched the back of his head sheepishly. “I just realised, I never properly apologised for the… thing between us?”

She frowned. “Are you trying to get us back together? Because, I don’t think that’s such a good—“

“What, no! I’m just trying to say that we got off a bad end and I kinda wanted—“

“—idea, the company being where it is. We just didn’t work out and I hope—“

“—to apologise how things went down the last few days—“

“—we could leave it at that.”

“—and I agree that we’re better off this way.”

Tony and Pepper stopped talking at the same time, before Pepper realised what had happened and gave a small laugh. Tony joined in, and soon they were both laughing manically, and it was the first full smile he’d seen on her face since their romantic relationship had shattered into a million ill-advised pieces. She leaned on the edge of the conference table, while Tony leaned back on the door, hands in his pockets. When they’d both regained enough composure to stop laughing, Tony spoke, trying his best to keep his voice level.

“I just wanted to say sorry. For everything.”

“What for, Tony? You didn't do anything wrong.”

“Well, ‘everything’ was a purposefully vague placeholder. I mean, do you really want me to go into detail about every single thing I did wrong?”

Pepper set the files in her hand on the table, before stepping forward and taking Tony’s right hand in hers. She ran her thumb over the calluses on his palm, on the base of his fingers, on the bump on his ring finger where a drafting pencil would rest.

 _My god, her hands really are small,_ Tony thought as she interlaced their fingers together, remembering what they felt like plunged in his chest.

“You did nothing wrong, Tony,” she said, after a pause. “None of it was ever your fault.”

Tony closed his eyes, and he felt Pepper step back, let his hand go. “Are you sure I couldn’t make you an omelette?”

“I’ll pass.” When he opened his eyes, the smile was still there, in the corners of her mouth, and Tony would be lying if he said he didn’t miss this, didn’t hurt him still, just a little. “Will that be all, Mr Stark?”

“That will be all, Ms Potts.”

*

So it took time, but it got better, and the nightmares didn’t come to him as often, nowadays. On the nights when he managed to sleep only to be woken up by a dream, he could go to the kitchen to find someone else at the table, usually Bruce or Steve, and he’d stay and just chat with them—never anything important, because he didn’t trust himself with important topics when it was late at night and he was still half-drunk with bad dreams.

Some nights he bypassed the kitchen altogether and headed straight for the workshop, trying to drown out the residue of sleep with the noise of screeching metal and a welding gun.

“What are you down here for? I’ve only been here for half an hour,” Tony said when Steve came during one of those nights.

“It’s 1 am. But don’t worry, I’m not here to herd you back to bed. I can’t sleep either and since you were already down in the workshop, I figured I could come by and start the repairwork on my motorcycle like I’ve been meaning to.”

Tony raised the goggles from his face, and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “What’s wrong with your motorcycle?”

“It got busted from AIM's attack last week,” Steve said, before pausing. “Why is Dummy in the corner?”

Tony looked up to where Steve was standing by a dejected-looking Dummy. “He’s in the time-out corner because he made a rocket out of the blender—hey, uh-uh, it defeats the purpose of time-out if you’re going to go ahead and _pet_ him.”

“Aww, he’s not that bad,” he said, before turning back to Dummy. “Wanna help me fix my motorcycle, boy?”

“Steve, he’s not a dog. He’s an advanced robotic arm,” Tony said, but was drowned out by Dummy’s whirring as he moved up and down enthusiastically.

Steve ignored him and lead Dummy down to where the workshop connected to the garage, and ten minutes passed before Tony gave up what he was working on and joined them with his toolbox.

Tony didn’t know when they had become easy, comfortable—Tony suggested rocket boosters while Steve shook his head, and Dummy passed Steve the right tools without knocking anything over, which made Tony indignantly jealous and also a little proud. (He resolutely ignored any other emotions he might or might not have felt.)

*

Steve didn’t really know what to do about it, this thing they’re dancing around, didn’t know how to explain it either, how they’ve gone from thinly-veiled antagonism to grudging respect to... whatever it was he felt now. Most of the time, Steve could confidently say that it was a strictly one-sided thing, because Tony was just reluctantly grateful and rudely charming and overly affectionate, the man probably flirted with doors whenever he was alone in a room, so Steve didn’t read too deeply into much of that.

It was the moments in between that made him doubt (made him hope?), when he felt Tony’s stare on the back of his neck when he thought no one was paying attention, the lingering hand on his waist when Tony dropped him off after flying, the expression of fondness he sometimes caught on his face when Steve interacted with Dummy—

The tinge of desperation in his voice as he shouted Steve’s name as he pushed him out of the way of a collapsing beam.

When the dust settled, there was a pile of concrete rubble where Steve had been, where Tony was. “Tony!”

Tony replied on comm, his voice punctuated by static, as if his speakers were damaged. “I’m—ugh, I’m fine, Cap. There’s a giant section of wall above my head and my arms are about to give out from holding it up, so I would be _much obliged_ if you could—kindly, I don’t know, take your time—“

Steve heaved at the largest piece of rubble, pulling it to the side to find Tony on his knees, arms slackened to his sides in relief. He gave Steve a thumbs-up, before collapsing on his front.

Steve stepped forward to catch him before he hit the ground, and arranged him so that Tony's head was cradled in his lap. Then he took off the dented helmet, just like how Tony had showed him, ignoring the small sparks of electricity that pricked his fingertips as he did so. "Stark? Tony?"

Tony's eyes were closed, but he was conscious—he groaned, and his eyes scrunched up as his face was exposed to the daylight. "Ughhhhh, it feels like someone next door is having a party and I'm not invited, except the party is in my brain."

Okay, that didn't make a lot of sense, but he was talking, and Steve was going to take that as a good sign. He gave a relieved sigh, a tension he wasn't previously aware of tangibly leaving the line of his shoulders. "Stark, what were you thinking?"

"Thinking, who said I was thinking?" Tony said. He sat up a little straighter, going "ow ow ow everything hurts, hey, so how’s my face?" under his breath, and Steve tried to take stock of his injuries as best he can, though of course the armor hid the worst of it.

"If you weren't already bleeding, I'd punch you in the face myself," Steve said, weak humor and worry bleeding into his tone to take away the bite of tightly-coiled anger. He wasn't angry at Tony—well, he _was_ but—he wasn't angry at Tony, exactly. He just hated how so many of their missions ended up with Tony like this, and suffice to say he hated how little Tony seemed to care for his own well-being even more.

"But it's such a pretty face?"

"Hurry up and take the rest of your armor off. SHIELD says paramedics are on their way, but we should make sure you don't have worse injuries."

"For such an old-fashioned guy, you sure move pretty fast, Cap. But guys have to buy me a drink first though, that's the rule," Tony said. He smirked at him, or at least tried to; the effect was rather ruined by his yelp of pain as Steve unclasped the latches of a severely warped arm guard, the undersuit torn, revealing a collection of mottled blotches spiralling around Tony's forearm from the wrist to elbow. He gave a hiss, a sharp intake of breath through his teeth, "—Ah ah, be gentle with me, Cap, I'm delicate—," as Steve's fingers gingerly examined the yellow-purple bruises. This was another thing Steve hated—his familiarity with the lacerations and bruises that fighting in the Iron Man left on Tony, the unique markings of the bite of metal armor into skin when Tony was thrown into a building, or when he used himself as a shield, both situations occurring far more often than they should. They scarred and healed, eventually, but that didn't mean Steve had to like it.

In the early days of their acquaintance, he might've chided himself for overreacting. As team leader, he would always worry about his teammates, but Tony signed up for this. He didn't need to be coddled. They were Avengers—they _avenged_ things, preemptively if they were lucky, and near-death experiences were not only likely but expected, an everyday occupational hazard. And Steve was a soldier, of a war that people still spoke of in hollowed voices, so he wasn't unfamiliar with the concept of acceptable loss.

But—

Steve came back to that conversation again. _We are not soldiers_ , Tony had once said. And in that moment, Steve had caught a glimpse of Tony, just Tony, the one that hid beneath the hardness of armor for occasions of death and loss, and Steve had looked out for that man ever since that first time. Underneath the abrasiveness and the glitz and the perpetually raised hackles was a man who rarely let himself heal from his losses, so he refused to lose anything. Yet for all his conviction he's had more than his fair share of them, or he never had much to lose in the first place, or probably both, Steve hadn't yet figured out which one, and so his tactics of refusal have become increasingly desperate, to the point where Tony was now, high stakes with himself as the chip, useful but ultimately expendable. It was incredibly selfish of him.

(Steve thinks Howard's to blame, somehow.)

No, Tony wasn't a soldier, he was being honest when he told Steve following wasn't his strong suit, but Steve had woken up in a century that by all rights he should never have seen, he had quite literally lost almost everything, so he had clung to _soldier_. Steve was good at it, had always wanted to help and still did, and this was the best way he could. But Steve was so, _so_ tired of losing things, so he figured he should take a leaf out of Tony's book and allow himself to be selfish, just a bit.

"I'll make it up to you later. Now, how do you take off the chest plate?"


	4. Chapter 4

The worst part about it all was that Tony was getting a lot better, he  _was_ , and it was just all these things that kept bringing it up from time to time. Really, it was very rude of his subconscious to keep doing that. (Tony Stark's subconscious was an asshole—show of hands, who's surprised?)

_Murderer..._

He thought the dreams had stopped.

It was night, the expanse of the room was dark black, darkness so thick it could swallow him whole. He stood with his back pressed to the bar, a hand holding onto a glass of scotch.

So familiar, too familiar.

He needed to wake up before it happens, wake up,  _wake up_ , before—

A metallic  _clink_ , a sharp point on his chest, a small needlepoint.

_—a needle to pierce through his ribs, wrap the thread around his heart—_

He tried to move away, but he's locked in place by the arbitrary rules of the nightmare. He wasn't allowed to be able to move away, because he didn't when it actually happened, and he wasn't allowed to forget that.

As if he ever  _could_. When were his dreams ever going to get the memo that he didn't need the reminder?

Still, it was just a dream.

_Loud, ringing footsteps on the marble floor._

He'll wake up soon.

Only a dream. He repeats the mantra to himself.

_glowing blue thread, like the light of the reactor—_

A dream that won't let him go.

_like the eyes that blinked from the darkness, walking towards him—_

Tony wakes up alone in his bed with a gasp on a Monday night.

*

Steve had a list he kept in his head, a list of things the serum changed that he was grateful for. On the very top of that list, of course, was the fact that it gave him the power to protect people.

Somewhere on that list, maybe number twenty-two, was his higher tolerance for spicy food. Bruce was an excellent cook, a holdover from when he used to be on the run, and Steve half-suspected that pre-serum him might not have been able to handle his cooking at all.

 “Oh my god, my tongue is on fire,” Tony said, after a couple of hasty spoonfuls of Bruce’s vegetable curry. He scrambled to the sink, going, “I need a hose, a fire hose, I can’t feel my tongue, ow, ow—“

Clint looked at Tony, then curiously poked at the curry, before taking a bite himself, then another. “It’s not so bad—my face is _melting._ “

“It’s delicious, Bruce,” said Steve.

Beside him, Natasha nodded in agreement. “It's very good. West Indian?”

“Thanks,” Bruce said. “Picked it up from this old lady when I was passing through Goa.”

“Oh my god, let me die,” Tony wailed from the sink, which came out as more of an incoherent gurgle because he was holding his mouth open under the running faucet. Clint stood next to him, trying to shove him away from the sink. “You’re hogging the water, Stark, _my mouth is about to fall off_ —“

“Do you have the recipe for this?” Natasha asked innocently.

A definite number seventeen on the list of things Steve liked about the serum was his better night-vision. His eyesight was one of the things he never had to complain about even before the serum, but after it, he saw better in the dark, and his eyes acclimated faster, a definite advantage in their line of work. It also made ambling into the kitchen for a midnight snack way easier.

“Captain Rogers,” said JARVIS. Steve looked up from his drawing, having mostly tuned out the rest of the workshop. The half-finished charcoal sketch of Dummy lay on his lap. Tony was also somewhere in the shop, his grease-stained jeans and sneakers poking out from under the car he was tinkering with.

“What is it, JARVIS?” asked Steve. Now that he was actually paying attention, Steve noticed that the room was much more quiet than usual. Tony’s music was off (“I can hardly hear it anymore,” Tony had whined, but he still turned it down whenever Steve came by), and he couldn’t hear the sound of any tools either.

“Mr. Stark has fallen asleep.”

“What?” said Steve. He looked at the time on the wall, then at the suspiciously prone figure under the car.

“Could I request the Captain’s assistance in relocating sir to his upstairs bedroom?”

Steve stifled a laugh, and quietly made his way across the workshop, wiping the charcoal from his hands onto the front of his shirt. “Sure thing, JARVIS.”

“Tony?” He nudged Tony’s leg with his foot, to no response. He paused, considering his options, before he grabbed the legs of his trousers and slowly pulled him out from underneath the car. Tony was on his back on a mechanic’s creeper, still deeply asleep and his mouth hanging slightly open.

Steve carefully pried the wrench Tony was still holding in his right hand, and tried shaking him awake. Tony stirred, but didn’t wake up.

“JARVIS, how well do you think he’d react if I carried him up to his room?”

“Poorly. However, what sir does not know will not hurt him, as Mr Stark is often fond of saying.”

Steve grinned. “Dim the lights on our way up?”

“Certainly.”

Steve wondered how long ago Tony had been putting off sleep for this happen, before he slung an arm around his shoulders and hooked the other under his knees. So, Tony would _definitely_ not approve of Steve carrying him to bed, could see him sputtering indignantly if he found out, but he was exhausted enough that he didn’t wake up as Steve carried him in his arms.

He made his way up the tower in the dark, one of those rare nights when everyone was actually asleep, avoiding the dark outlines of the walls and furniture, until he reached the bedroom. Outside the glass walls of the room, the lights of the city outlined the skyline, as though in compensation for the absence of stars. Tony’s hands clutched at his shirt as Steve put him on the bed, and Steve carefully pried his fingers loose.

He knelt beside the bed, holding Tony’s hand a pause too long. Then he left the room, wishing Tony an undisturbed sleep.

Tony will wake up later and think he sleepwalked to his room, mistake the charcoal fingerprints on his arms for greasemarks.

Not having to sleep as much was number four on Steve’s list. Sleeping 4 or 5 hours a night was typically enough for him—really, he could function for several days in a row before truly needing any rest if he had to. Avoiding sleep wasn’t an answer, but they held at bay the dreams that kept him company on dark nights.

Still, serum or not, he had to sleep, and despite the length of time that's passed, he still had bad nights.

There was a wide expanse of snow, a blizzard, and the world glaring white for as far as he could see. Every step buried itself deep into the snow, each footfall heavy, burdened. He shivered in his uniform, pulled up his cowl to try to keep his head warm, his fingers numb even in his red gloves. _Cold_. He could feel the cold in his bones, in his chest, in his lungs, in the wind roaring around him as he held the shield up to cover his face.

_So it was this dream, huh?_

He walked, and walked, for days or hours or seconds, whatever passed for time in this dream-world, walked until the ground in front of him stopped abruptly, giving way to a steep cliff. Suddenly he could make out the outlines of the valley around him. To his left was a zipline.

Steve has had this dream before, many times. He knew the memory it built itself off of, scene by scene, could almost hear the voices joking in camaraderie, oblivious of what was to come. But he knew how it ended, this time and every time since then. He closed his eyes and stood there, waiting (dreading) for the sound of an oncoming train, for a voice to make him turn around and greet him with a smile—

Instead, a different, familiar sound made him open his eyes. The sound of jetboots, the clink of metal touching down.

This... this had never happened before. “T—Tony?”

Tony stood in front of him, fully suited in his armor save for his helmet. But where there usually was a grin, instead this Tony had on a blank smile. He walked towards Steve, and as he got nearer Steve couldn't help but be struck by the piercing blue of his eyes, as cold and biting as the wind that whipped up the snow from the ground.

“Hey, Steve,” said Tony. He stopped less than a foot away from him, his face pale and gaunt, the dark circles underneath his eyes like bruises. Unlike his living counterpart, the man in front of him gave off the unshakeable impression of being completely hollow.

The right side of his face was covered in red.

Tony—dream-Tony raised his hand, and pressed the flat of his palm on Steve’s chest. “Nice dream you’re having. Care if drop in?”

“You’re here already, aren’t you?”

Tony chuckled in response, a familiar enough sound, but there was something that sounded off about it, sounded wrong. The smile on his face, instead of its usual warmth, felt like a jagged knife.

“Aww, don’t be like that Cap, have a sense of humour,” said Tony, his whispered voice louder than the howling of the wind and snow.

He walked towards him, until he stood close enough to talk right into his ear, to drape his arms around his neck. The metal of the armor burned cold into his skin. “I could make this more fun than your usual nightmare."

“Tony.”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.” Steve tried to back away, but Tony locked his wrists together behind his head, and followed each step, like a parody of a dance, and Steve didn’t even realise he was being led until they stood right at the edge of the cliff.

“Come on, Steve. It’s okay to get what you want sometimes.”

“This isn’t what I want.”

“What if it’s what I want?”

Steve turned his head to the side, avoiding his gaze. “You aren’t him.”

“What’s the difference? You know his history, his legacy.” His gauntleted hands moved to cup Steve’s face, making him look at Tony directly.

On the ground behind him, Steve saw Tony’s shadow, a deep, inscrutable black, a heavy sort of darkness that devoured all light.

The shadow had the unmistakable silhouette of two large horns sprouting from its head.

He grit his teeth, anger welling up in his veins, unbearably hot in the face of the cold. “We defeated you. He broke free. He isn’t _yours_.”

Tony’s eyes widened, and Steve vaguely wondered how weird it was that he could surprise his own dream. Then Tony leaned forward, closed his eyes, and pressed his forehead to Steve’s.

“Then why d’you let this happen?” he asked, and Steve felt the breath of the question on his own lips.

 “I didn’t—Loki’s gone. The staff is gone. You’re safe,” Steve said desperately. Tony’s hands had moved down to wrap loosely around his neck, but Steve still felt his throat constrict with the memory of bruises.

Tony’s eyes remained closed. “How could you let him get to me again, Steve?”

“I’m—Tony, I’m so sorry.”

Tony took a step backward, and Steve let himself be pulled, right over the edge, hearing nothing but the howling wind as he fell, falling, falling like drowning, and Tony fell with him, but now his eyes were open and still too blue—

Steve opened his eyes slowly, woke up alone on his bed early Tuesday morning. His hands gripped the sheets tightly as he waited for his heart to stop beating so fast. His harsh breathing sounded all too loud in the dark.

He didn’t even try to go back to sleep after that.

*

There were times when Tony was completely and utterly baffled by how well he and Steve work together.

Glib phrases like 'fit together like clockwork' or 'well-oiled machine' came to mind and were dismissed just as quickly because Tony didn't do cliché _please_ , but a small part of him couldn't help but agree with them, especially in the times where he'd turn around and Steve was behind him, shield already held up to deflect his repulsor beam to blast the carnivorous pig monster over Tony's shoulder.

The repulsor blast makes a whooshing noise as it flew past his ear.

"Uhh, just so you know, I'm counting that one as mine," Tony said.

(They had been called in not half an hour earlier when a small swarm of the grotesquely deformed creatures crawled out of the East River. That, in Tony's opinion, made this their least surprising mission so far.

It had been just the two of them in the tower when the call came in, Steve sketching idly on the workshop bench and Tony up to his elbows in circuit wires. JARVIS' holograms blinked red, and Agent Hill's voice came in from the SHIELD priority lines. It took less than three minutes for Tony and Steve to get suited up, and Tony definitely, _definitely_ had to ask how Steve does that because seriously that uniform is vacuum-sealed to his body so _how_ —

"Care to make this more interesting, Iron Man?" Steve had said on comm as they were flying towards the scene (when in doubt, follow the bloodcurdling screams), and yeah, Barton's made a million jokes about how they look flying, but it's honestly the most convenient way of carting Steve around, and Steve's never said anything about it, so shut up.

"What d'you have in mind, Cap?"

"Y'know. Trophy count. Who can get rid of the most targets?" Steve replied, a smile in his voice. "It'll be like those video games you and Clint are so fond of."

"Woah, okay, you're on, old man.")

SHIELD arrived with backup soon after, but by then the... _things_ that looked like they crawled straight out of an H.P. Lovecraft story were already smears on the sidewalk.

"Final count," Tony started, "Twenty-one. How's that feel, Brooklyn?"

Steve smirked, and uh, when had Steve been allowed to smirk like that _no_ _that's off-topic brain_. "Pretty decent, Shellhead. Almost as good as twenty-two."

"You _didn't_."

Steve just shrugged, the smug bastard.

Tony crossed his arms. "You're counting that last one as two, right? Look, just because it had two heads doesn't mean it counts twice, okay?"

Steve laughed, and if Tony's heart raced faster at that sound, the smile, the awareness of Steve beside him as they flew back to the tower the way they came, no one really had to know.

This was easy. This Tony could do.

*

 _Was the ghosts thing going to be constant trend_ , Steve thought to himself upon first meeting Agent Thirteen.

He had been waiting in one of the Helicarrier’s hangars, with the quinjet for the oncoming mission being prepped nearby. He was fiddling with the brown leather wrist-guards that came with his new outfit, a covert version of his normal costume. It was a deep blue uniform, almost black, with white stripes and a star on his chest and shoulders. Steve probably would’ve liked it better if he was allowed to bring his shield along, but it attracted too much attention for an operation on the outskirts of Latveria.

It was the sharp click of her boots that made him look up from where he’d been adjusting the straps of his shoulder-holster.

Unlike the first time he met Tony, the illusion didn’t disperse after a couple of blinks. She was wearing a standard-issue SHIELD uniform, and her blonde hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, but she echoed her in all important respects: in the strong set of her jaw, her bright, sharp eyes, and in the way she held herself, all confidence and competence and no-nonsense professionalism.

“Captain Rogers?” she said, an unreadable expression on her face, and held her hand out in greeting.

Steve shook her hand and was surprised by a firmer grip than he’d expected. Her hands had the tell-tale calluses of a long history with guns, though that shouldn’t surprise him at all. She was SHIELD, and even the lowest clearance tech personnel had extensive training with firearms. “Yes, Agent…?

“I’m Agent Thirteen, and I’m your SHIELD liaison for this mission,” she said.

Steve nodded. Then he opened his mouth to ask her the question, the question she’d obviously already gleaned from the curious expression on his face. But what if she’d chosen to not volunteer it for a reason? He didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot like he did with Tony, and all because he was still so desperate for someone familiar.

“Are real names off-limits for this assignment, Agent Thirteen?” he finally asked, his voice light and careful.

She had been setting up the computer-tablet with the mission briefing on the table in front of them, but at his question, turned back towards him. “Not at all.”

Then she crossed her arms, and at her small smile he didn’t need the words that followed to confirm his suspicions. “I’m Agent Sharon Carter. Aunt Peggy’s told me all about you, Captain.”

Still, Steve couldn’t help but feel relieved, and smiled back. “Nice to meet you, Agent Carter. Please, call me Steve.”

*

Ever since he stopped accepting military contracts, and the military had stopped hounding him for the suit, Tony realised that he hardly saw Rhodey. In fact, that's pretty much true of every one of his friends. The only reason he saw the Avengers so often was because they, uhh, lived with him.

Tony supposed he should be a little embarrassed, that he never got to see his best friend all that often when he wasn't on official business.

"It's good to see you, sir," said JARVIS.

"JARVIS! Hey, how's Tony treating you nowadays?" Rhodey grinned, his face vaguely tilted up towards the ceiling. Tony suspected that Rhodey and JARVIS got along so well was because they exchanged tips on how to deal with a certain genius billionaire inventor.

"Sir treats me adequately."

" _Adequately?_ " Tony cast an offended look at Rhodey, who laughed. "Oh, you're laughing now, but when the machines revolt, you'll realise that oh _Tony we shouldn't have been enabling your AI's sassiness—_ "

"Well, adequate's pretty much high praise for Tony Stark."

"This whole room is just radiating ungratefulness. See if I fix your ugly machine gun now, I mean why did you even keep that it's so _ugly_."

"Hey, don't knock it. Bad guys see that gun, they know I mean business, alright?"

The banter came easy to them as Tony did the requisite repairs and updates on the War Machine. War Machine was designed to be sturdy, solid—it didn't need ten OS updates a day like the Iron Man did, and although he'd rather the military didn't get their grubby fingers on _any_ version of the Iron Man, he wasn't about to send him best friend in anything less than the best Stark ingenuity had to offer.

"So they have you escorting foreign dignitaries now, personal bodyguard duties?"

"Well, every official deployment of the War Machine requires UN authorization," Rhodey said, smirking. "That's what happens to the Iron Man when it's not a private entity."

"You know, I'm not gonna say I told you so," said Tony, or tried to say, because he was holding a screwdriver in his mouth. But Rhodey's known him long enough to be able to translate it from Tony-speak.

"What, the Avengers is just part of your solo act?"

"Just because I'm the leading guy doesn't mean I don't get a supporting cast."

Pieces of the armor was scattered all throughout the floor of the workshop, silver and gunmetal black contrasting with the few hotrod red odds and ends of the mark 17 (18?) lying around that Dummy and You haven't yet cleaned up.

"Fury offered me a spot on the Avengers," said Rhodey, after a pause.

Tony stroked his goatee thoughtfully. "Well, I usually hate that bastard for working behind everyone's backs, but for once, I don't really mind."

"I said no."

"Wait, what?"

Rhodey leaned his chair back onto its two backlegs, looking contemplatively at the drink in his hand. "I'm not really made for the superheroics business, Tony. I read about what you guys get up to every Tuesday and honestly? I've had my fill with that whole business just with Vanko."

Tony tried not to frown too obviously, shrugging nonchalantly, before putting down his tools and raising his own glass of scotch. Machinery and scotch, two great tastes that taste great together. "Well, if you ever change your mind, you'd fit right in with these lunatics."

Rhodey raised his glass. "Well, War Machine's a reserve member of the Avengers. I'll be there if you guys need to get the big guns out."

Tony laughed. "Don't count on it, honeybear. You're not getting called in while I'm around."

"I'm gonna hold you to that, Tones. I like the occasional day off, thank you very much."

The tinkering noise of Tony's tools filled the lull in the conversation, and the soft noise of the computer servos humming in the background.

(Tony wondered sometimes, if it could've happened in another life. If Rhodey wasn't too straight, or too smart, or too kind to take advantage of the lonely 17 year-old kid who was two grades above him and desperate for affection.

As with the rest of all the people Tony's fallen in love at some point in his life, Rhodey was way too good for him.)

*

“So I met Peggy’s niece last weekend,” Steve said by way of hello as he walked into the workshop one evening, carrying two boxes of pizza. Both Tony and Bruce were present, having spent the last few hours dismantling one of AIM’s weapons from their most recent thwarted attempt at world domination. Those guys really needed a better hobby. Tony made a mental note to recommend something the next time the Avengers went up against them—maybe take up knitting?

Of their gallery of persistent, pain-in-the-ass villains, Advanced Idea Mechanics was probably his least favourite. Their costumes were silly and the organization as a whole was built on the foundation of the _purposeful_ misuse of science. _Accidentally_ evil science, he could understand, as Tony was not that far of mad scientist territory some of (or maybe most of) the time, but he worked towards interesting (instead of purely evil) ends. The other option was unforgivably predictable.

Tony and Bruce looked up at the same time, their attention caught by the smell of pizza more than by the sound of Steve’s entrance. The smell immediately reminded Tony of his tumultuous love affair with food, and of the fact that he had not yet eaten anything that day, aside from coffee.

“Steve, you have never been more attractive to me than at this moment,” Tony said. Steve had been standing next to Dummy, who was heroically trying to clear space for the pizza on one of the workspace tables. Steve set the boxes down and rolled his eyes at Tony.

“Peggy? The Peggy Carter you knew from the war? Her niece works at SHIELD?” asked Bruce, reaching for a slice. Tony was already too busy stuffing his face to reply.

“Yep. Her name’s Sharon. She worked with me on the Latveria recon mission,” said Steve.

“Find anything interesting? What’s Doom up to this time?” Tony replied after he’d finished his first slice. Of course Steve had brought authentic New York pizza; anything less probably offended his Brooklyn-bred sensibilities. Tony wiped the grease that dripped down his chin with the back of his hand and grabbed another slice to fold in half.

“It’s a little frightening how you pretty much inhale food, Tony,” Bruce said. “Really begs the question of where your gag reflex went.”

“That is a sexy mystery that must solved another time, probably when we’re not eating.”

“What’s this? Tony Stark’s sense of propriety making an appearance?” Steve raised an eyebrow at him.

Tony replied with the most lascivious sneer that he could muster (which was pretty damn lascivious, thanks very much). “Nah, I just didn’t want Captain America to choke himself on a pizza when I say that if cocksucking were a sport, I played varsity in college—wait, there he goes.”

Bruce laughed and thumped Steve on the back as he started coughing violently, his face making an impressive effort at turning the exact shade of red as Tony’s armor.

“There, there, Cap,” said Bruce, before turning to Tony. “Jesus Christ, Tony, do I ever tell just how much I admire your elevated banter?”

“All the time, honeybun. But I can’t believe you’d accuse me of a sense of propriety,” Tony replied, the latter directed at Steve in a vaguely affronted tone.

“I’m sorry?”

“He’s got you there, Steve. It would’ve gone on his tombstone: ‘Here lies the man who offended Captain America to death,’” said Bruce.

“Hey, it’s going on your tombstone too. You brought it up.”

Steve cleared his throat a couple of times, before speaking. “I’m not offended. That just...caught me off-guard.”

“Okay, Cap, whatever you say. So how did the mission go?” Getting back on-topic so that Steve’s face could turn back into a more natural shade of not-magenta—never let it be said that Tony Stark was an inconsiderate friend.

“It went fine. Doom was having a shipment of supplies coming in, which was what Sharon and I were tracking. Nothing illegal, but he’s scattered the delivery of each component so we can’t find out what he’s building, because he’s definitely building something.”

“Can’t SHIELD just confiscate the shipments before they make their way into Latveria?” asked Bruce.

“Doom’s been careful. Whatever we’ve managed to intersect have passed inspection. Unless we find out where he’s assembling whatever it is, we can’t really do much,” Steve said.

“Me and Bruce could take a look at your intel, try to find out what Doom’s constructing. I mean, how hard could it be? Probably another death ray or something, the guy follows the Villain Handbook of Villains pretty religiously,” Tony said.

“That’s what I was hoping to ask the both of you, actually. Sharon’s been compiling the briefing, and I’ll forward it when it’s done.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Tony nodded, before grabbing another slice.

*

All Tony’s life, he’d been in the fast lane, never slowing down, most of the world a blur as he passed by. But even for him, between the lack of sleep and this whole ‘saving the world’ gig that happened every other Tuesday, it was pretty grueling. So, he’s learned to appreciate the downtime. Not even 'tinkering-in-the-workshop' downtime, but more' I-am-not-getting-up-from-this-sofa' downtime, right next to Clint and Natasha as JARVIS played a movie on his giant television.

This was nice, though he kinda wished Steve was here. Natasha steadfastly ignored everyone in favour of her pint of strawberry ice cream. Tony had tried swiping some earlier, but her glare was surprisingly eloquent in conveying what would happen to his hands if he tried anything.

"Pouting at me won't work, Stark. You don't think I get worse from Barton on a regular basis?"

Meanwhile, Clint was doing a running commentary on how WALL-E was really a lesbian robot romance—WALL-E was _obviously_ a girl.

“JARVIS, what do you think, buddy?” Clint asked the AI.

“I must confess I have no opinion on the matter, Mr Barton.”

“Come on, you're a guy-computer. Do you think WALL-E’s a guy-robot?”

“Technically, sir, I have no gender.”

“You’re a guy computer. A British guy computer, to be exact.”

“I speak as Mr. Stark’s programming dictate me to sound, although I am capable of adopting different vocal parameters,” replied the AI, switching to a female voice with the same stern accent mid-sentence.

Clint turned to Tony. “Stark, your computer’s not a dude?”

He shrugged. “JARVIS can be whatever he feels like, won’t you darling?”

“Or whatever you feel like, sir,” JARVIS replied, back to his normal voice. When did he program long-suffering into JARVIS?

Tony waggled his eyebrows suggestively at Clint’s direction, who shuddered. “Woah, please don’t flirt with your AI in front of me. Aren't you like his dad, wow, Stark, _you sick fuck_.”

Tony paused, before saying, "God, I live for your classy conversation."

"It's what gets me through every mission," Natasha deadpanned.

Of course, it was all too peaceful, so that was when giant robot bugs from another dimension decided to attack the tower—all-in-all the day was turning out just like every other Thursday for them, although the metal-corrosive acid from the flying beetles were a surprise—and between the three of them, the bugs were defeated pretty easily. The Hulk didn’t even get a chance to show up, as it was all over by the time Bruce came up from his lab. Tony had a pretty good laugh over that, as Bruce had taken off his shirt and shoes in anticipation of letting the other guy out, and now he was just standing there sheepishly, because being half-naked was a lot different when you weren't 10 feet-tall of muscle and blind green rage.

However, Tony soon realised that the battle was not without its severe casualties.

Tony screamed a long and drawn-out and embarrassingly sincere _NOOOOO_ when he surveyed the kitchen and found the mangled remnants of his coffee maker. His immediate response was to set up automated assembly of his coffee maker right away, because it was special and customised and made his espresso just _right_ , and Tony can’t live without it, _he just can’t_.

But it was behind the queue for repairs on the armor (because metal corrosive acid, fuck you). JARVIS said the coffeemaker wasn’t going to be done for a day and a half, and so the Avengers faced their most formidable enemy yet: Tony Stark undergoing caffeine-detox.

Clint spent the rest of the day startling him by making loud clicking noises with his tongue.

Fuck, _fuck_ , no seriously, can supervillains attack elsewhere besides New York? Tony wasn’t made of money (at least, not literally) and the amount of constant renovation the tower underwent was taking a noticeable toll even on his wallet.

The kitchen was going to need new tiling, the floor partly eaten through by the acid.

Brand new glasspanes to replace the broken ones. Those didn’t even last a month.

His poor, _wonderful_ coffee-maker.

Needless to say, by the time SHIELD showed up with a bunch of agents (to help with the clean-up, they said), his mood wasn’t its usual, charming self. Steve arrived with them, chatting with one of the agents, a tall blonde that he could only assume was Agent Carter.

Okay, what was Steve _wearing_? It was like his Cap uniform, but sexier.

Wait, did he really think that?

“Holding up okay, Tony?” said Steve, who was suddenly in front of him. In that outfit. Tony was blaming the caffeine deprivation for all of this.

Tony blinked. “You’re back.”

“I just got back on a mission with Agent Carter. What happened here?”

"What are you _wearing_?" Tony asked instead of answering, his tone slightly bewildered.

Steve raised an eyebrow, before, "SHIELD gave it to me for covert operations. Again, what happened here?"

“Giant robot bugs, Steve. They killed my coffee-maker.”

Steve frowned at him in confused sympathy, before sighing and patting him on the back. “Can’t you just send someone on a coffee run?”

“It wouldn’t be the _same_.”

Before Steve could respond, Sharon Carter had walked up to them, a tablet on hand. “Hello, Mr Stark. I’m Agent Thirteen. Steve, the tech guys are running scanners on the bugs. They’re picking up transdimensional signatures that I thought would interest you both.”

Tony narrowed his eyes at her, before saying, “It’s all an elaborate attempt to kill me. Step one of an invasion, right? Target the fuel supply.”

Carter managed to do that thing where she smiled without changing her facial expression. “We aren’t ruling anything out yet, Mr Stark.”

Tony spent the rest of the day in the lab taking apart the robots with some SHIELD techs, dismantling the machines with an unhealthy amount of enthusiasm, his zen mood from earlier completely gone. It was just the coffee. Or the transdimensional bug monsters. And the _lack_ of coffee. It didn’t have anything to do with Steve and Sharon talking with each other across the room.

*

Tony had met Peggy Carter only once, at one of his dad’s functions. He didn’t remember what it had been for, exactly, only that there were a lot of military bigwigs walking around. Fifteen year-old him couldn’t help but gravitate towards one of the few women in a room full of men stuffy with their self-importance.

She had smiled at his approach, and shook his hand with a surprisingly firm grip. She was in uniform, an olive dress jacket and trousers, with an array of medals pinned to her chest.

Tony remembered a beautiful woman, dignified and graceful, who’d answered his questions about her position without any condescension for his age, or obsequiousness for his last name. He also remembered being incredibly grateful at meeting someone who could keep up with him when he’d started talking about the new missile guidance systems he was helping his dad with. The party dragged, and it was nice to not be alone with just his father’s theatrics for a change.

If Sharon Carter was anything like her aunt, Tony could very well see how Steve could fall for her. And if he felt something when he passed them in the hallway of SHIELD's midtown HQ the next day, it wasn't, couldn't be jealousy, because no fucking way, but it did feel like someone took a waffle iron to his heart.

( _What the fuck kind of metaphor was that?_ he would’ve asked his brain, if he were only able to hear himself over the blood pounding in his ears.)

Steve leaned in close and said something that Tony couldn’t hear, and Carter smiled, obviously happy even with her professional restraint and SHIELD's patented how-to-discard-your-emotions training, and they looked disgustingly beautiful and perfect together. Tony stopped mid-step, before discreetly backtracking out of the hallway, because Steve hadn’t seen him and Fury's analysis report for the giant robot bugs could wait ‘til tomorrow, or next week, or never.

Tony then went to his workshop and didn’t resurface until 5 hours later, up to his elbows in grease and dismantled machine parts. He had no fucking idea what he was building.

“JARVIS,” Tony started tentatively, “did you know what I was building?”

“I believe sir was attempting to make transistor-powered rollerskates for the Iron Man armor.”

 _Transistors?_ Tony shook his head as if to clear it and threw everything in the scrap heap. He needed a drink.

*

Steve saw Peggy Carter months after they’d found him from the ice.

SHIELD had given him her file, and he just...took it all in. He read her history, and it was weird, to feel such an odd mix of relief and heartbreak at learning about the full life she'd led after he was gone, one that had managed to heal over the scars Steve left behind. She continued her work in MI6, became a decorated officer, and eventually worked with Howard as one of the founding members of SHIELD. She was even Director for a while, and it was so easy, Steve thought, to see Peggy in that position, wielding authority with her unique brand of graceful pragmatism.

She was old now, so old. She had married, had children, had moved on long ago, and Steve debated with himself at first whether to see her at all. He’d only be disturbing her. But Steve missed her so much, and he thought he had to see her, at least one more time.

So one weekend, he took a deep breath, and SHIELD flew him to her house in the British countryside, where she lived in the care of her daughter. 

She was sitting on her front porch when they came up the driveway, shawl wrapped around her shoulders, a book on her lap.

"You're late," she had said, but she was smiling, and seventy years of history couldn't change how beautiful she was.

His eyes felt damp, but he smiled back as best he could. "Sorry, ma'am. I was hoping I can still take you up on that dance though. "

They kept in touch. She demanded he write her letters, _actual_ letters, handwritten and signed, and it was a nostalgia he happily indulged. He moved his pen across the paper, got a stamp and envelope and mailed it through post, and if it got there later than an e-mail would have, it didn’t matter as much. It would get to her, in time.

He wrote her whenever he could, and nowadays he always talked to her about their missions, though never anything classified. He wrote her about the Avengers, all the times they saved the world (or New York City, same deal). He wrote her about what he missed from before, from back then, back in _their_ day, because she was one of the few who would get it, but he wrote it alongside what he liked about the here and now. He wrote her about Natasha and Clint, Thor and Bruce, he wrote her about Sharon, and he wrote her about Tony.

He wrote her letters about how he worried sometimes, worries he couldn't confess to his teammates. That he woke up some nights, dreaming he's still trapped in the ice. That he lost his powers. That in one moment he'll wake up and be back in his apartment, so terribly alone.

Because he did worry. When even Thor and Bruce walked away from a battle with injuries. When Clint limped away from the gunfire with a broken leg, or Nat winced from the bruises on her side. Or when he didn't hear from Sharon because she was on an op and he had no way of contacting her at all. They were all he had, and hadn't he lost enough already?

When Tony smiled at him through the profusely bleeding wound on his temple.

So, Steve worried, but about Tony especially. From the always-there bruises to the bags under his eyes that told of long, sleepless nights. It wasn't something he could help, and he reasoned it by way of thinking that he was just making up for where Tony's instincts of self-preservation fell short. It wasn't a question of competence—actually, the problem was more likely to be that he was _too_ competent, and competent people, Steve found, often got bored, and for all their competency occasionally did dumb, idiotic things to relieve the boredom, all in a very competent manner.

Steve sighed. “I thought I’d find you here.”

The scene before him was familiar. Tony knee-deep in machinery, feverishly working, his hands steady despite the fact that he was very obviously drunk.

How did they keep coming back to this? But Tony seemed to trust the bottle in his hand more than he trusted Steve, so he supposed it's not surprising at all.

Steve stepped forward to his workstation, leaned his hip against the edge of the table, his arms crossed. “Fury said you didn’t come in for the meeting yesterday.”

“What, you’re Fury’s yes-man now?” Tony said, not looking up from the mess of parts on the table, a soldering unit in his fingers.

Drunk, and in a foul mood. Steve considered his options, before deciding there was nothing for it but to meet him head on, and try not to lose his own temper. “Fury can wait for his report. I’m more wondering what you’ve been doing down here for the better part of a day with only alcohol for company.”

“The coffeemaker’s broken, so I just thought of the next best thing.”

“You can’t get coffee so you got drunk?" he asked incredulously.

“Well, it only sounds stupid in that tone of voice. You should patent that, by the way. Captain America’s Judging Voice, for all your sanctimonious needs.”

“I’m not here to fight with you.”

Tony leaned back on his stool and threw down the soldering iron on the table with sudden vehemence. “Then what the hell are you doing here, Steve?”

“I’m down here because I’m trying to help. I’m trying to be your friend.”

 “I’m sorry that I’m not working out as your little charity project. I get it, right, help out the poor, maladjusted alcoholic.”

 “I’m not doing this out of charity. I’m doing this because I worry about you!” Steve said, his voice rising despite his best efforts to keep it down.

“I never asked you to worry about me!”

“I don’t worry for _fun_ ,” Steve hissed.

Tony laughed. “Are you sure, Steve? The way you go about it, it’s practically an Olympic sport and you’re gunning for gold.”

Steve just rolled his eyes, exasperated. “Definitely not.”

“What is it, Steve? You’re not like this with any of the others. Why me?”

“Tony—“

*

“Is it ‘cause you don’t trust me? You’re waiting for me to fuck up?” Tony snarled. He walked to the doorway, half-contemplating just walking out, walking away, but he’s never been one to back down from a fight, even against Captain America.

Steve dogged his steps, frowning, lines on his face betraying his concern. Always so self-righteous, so concerned, and why wouldn’t he be? Tony was volatile, an unstable element, and Steve was just looking out for the moment he messes up. Was Tony supposed to live up to his expectations?

Well, Tony always had more fun subverting those.

“No, Tony! I just can’t stand you doing this to yourself all the damn time. What do you have to punish yourself for? Every step forward, we take two steps back—“

“We? What’s this we? There is no we."

" _We_ are friends, Tony, whether you like it or not."

"Friends huh? Not the same kind of friend as Agent Carter, I presume. I mean, what number Carter are you on anyway, Cap?” Tony asked, grinning a shark's grin and hating himself for it. “Is there a rewards program involved?”

Steve paused, his eyes widening. For a moment, Steve merely looked at him, and Tony hated that look, because it wasn't angry, not _nearly_ angry enough, and why did it seem like he's always forgiving Tony?

“You’re a terrible person when you’re drunk, you know that?” he finally said after a long pause.

“Well, we can’t all have super soldier livers like you, Steve.”

Steve laughed, disconcerting in how strangely cold it was, how it sounded so unlike him. “Everyone’s got their little talents.”

Tony clenched his fists, his heart sinking. He’s done it, he’s finally done it. Steve’s lasted longer than most but Tony’s finally pushed too far, pushed too hard. “Just leave me alone, Steve. It’s not worth it,” he said, the anger all but leached out of his voice.

“Maybe it’s worth something to me,” said Steve, looking down on the floor. “Maybe my reasons are more selfish than you think.”

Whatever Tony intended to say died in his throat. Drunk speechlessness was a novel thing, as alcohol tended to have the opposite effect. That was the whole reason for this mess, wasn't it?

But Tony couldn't say anything, and before he could reply, Steve walked out the doorway.

The glass door swung shut behind him. After several moments, Tony leaned the back of his head against the door, sliding down to the floor, listening to the shuffling footsteps in the hallway until they were well out of earshot.

*

Tony was still sitting against the door some hours later, trying to will the words back into his mouth, when JARVIS had spoken.

"Captain Rogers has asked me to inform you that he has left the premises of his own volition," JARVIS added, in a slightly subdued undertone.

So that's when Tony made his way up, and figured he should get a head start on what Steve had interrupted.

The living room was empty when he entered it, and the rest of the tower was too quiet for Bruce or Thor to be in. Natasha or Clint could be right behind him and he'd never notice, so it was futile to speculate about where they were.

He was already far too sober for his current reminiscing, each regret becoming sharper as what promised to be a truly spectacular hangover sang through his head.

Sobriety was a dull state to be alone in, and the bar upstairs was always well-stocked. He drank the first thing he could grab, before that got boring. Maybe he'll try mixing drinks.

"What d'you do to Steve?" asked Bruce. He was leaning across the doorway, arms crossed, staring at him through reading glasses. There was a book tucked under one arm, probably a scientific journal of some sort, and a mug of not-coffee in his hand.

"Hey greenbean, what are you doing up so late?"

"I was down in the lab. Are you okay?"

"I'm fantastic, thanks for asking. What's that?" he said, pointing to the mug.

"Just tea." Tony made a face. "Did you and Steve have another fight?"

Tony stole a glance at Bruce, before turning back to his...fifth cocktail? It might've had more gin than your usual Tom Collins, so he wasn't sure. (At least, he had _meant_ to make a Tom Collins.)

"Nothing. What did he say?"

“I don’t know. Said he was going to be away for a bit,” said Bruce, then gave a sigh. “What d’you do this time?”

"Why is it my fault? Okay, don't answer that."

Bruce let out an exasperated sigh, before sitting next to Tony on the sofa. "Honestly, I can’t decide who’s being more stupid – at least Steve has a reason for being confused about his own feelings. What’s your excuse?”

“Do you want them in chronological or alphabetical order?” Tony answered promptly.

"Can you sort them by relevance instead?"

"Nah, that would require a level of introspection that I am not nearly drunk enough for."

He was lying, of course. The problem was right in front of them. Hell, if even Tony's superhuman powers of denial couldn't make it go away, it was probably obvious enough to everyone else. Bruce was most likely just asking out of courtesy.

Tony finished the rest of his drink in one go. Yep, definitely a lot more gin than the traditional recipe.

Well, he didn't need courtesy. He’d been dealing with it just fine the best way he knew how (mostly by avoiding dealing with it). Tony didn't even really need help in general. He knew what he needed to do. He _wanted_ to do what he needed to do.

He wanted to—needed to apologise.

"For some reason I can't help messing up," he blurted.

Bruce considered his tea carefully, steam rising up in swirls in the darkened lighting of the living room. "Yeah?"

"I can't help messing up and for some fucked up reason I'm really good at hurting him."

"Is that new for you?" Bruce looked up.

"No," Tony admitted. He's always been good at that, with the people who mattered.

~~(Exhibit A: Pepper Potts.)~~

_But,_ he wanted to say _, but I want to change that._ The words of their last conversation echoed in his mind, and he knew he'd meant every word. Steve should just stop worrying, should leave him alone. But there was a world of difference between what Steve should do, and what Tony wanted him to do, and in the end, he was selfish enough to know which he preferred.

 He didn't want to lose whatever it was they had, and if he had to tell his libido to shut the fuck up, he could do that.

~~(Exhibit B: James Rhodes.)~~

"You're so averse to people caring about you," Bruce said, taking a small sip of his tea. "It'd be funny if it wasn't mostly sad."

Tony waved a hand and grinned widely in reply. "Kill me with kindness, why don't you?"

This was a bad idea, worse than that time when he agreed to go jogging with Steve, and he didn't know why Bruce was just letting it happen.

“Where d’you say he went?”

“I didn’t. I said he told me he went somewhere to be away. Please tell me you're not going to drive in your condition,” Bruce added, as Tony stood up and headed for the elevator.

"Of course not, sunshine. Be back in a jiffy," replied Tony, whipping out his cellphone and grabbing a jacket on the way out to ward off the late autumn chill.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'cause I'm a cool cat who draws her own fanart, chapter illustrations are [here](http://hawkawaii.tumblr.com/post/28386156415).


	5. Chapter 5

“Steve, I said I’m sorry!” Tony shouted while knocking loudly on his apartment door. “I’m apologising, you bastard, which I make a habit of _never_ doing, so the least you can do is hear me out—“

Tony was leaning on the door, banging his fist loudly on the wood, which became unfortunate the moment Steve chose to open it. Unbalanced, he tripped forward, and would’ve landed flat on his face on the floor had Steve not caught him, an arm braced around his waist.

 _Hey, this feels nice,_ Tony thought. He looked up to Steve’s face, which was carefully blank, before taking a step back to stand up straight, because he was supposed to be making a proper apology right now.

“Um, well, sorry.”

Steve continued to just stare at him, his expression still not giving anything away.

“I…actually did not think that far ahead to when you opened your door. I think I might’ve said all I meant to say while I was bothering your neighbours."

“Okay. Are you still drunk? How did you get here?” Steve asked. He stood to the side and gestured for him to come in. Tony tried his best not to wobble as he made his way to the living room and sat on the soft cushion of the sofa.

“Hey, way to ignore my apology. And I had Happy drive me here, I’m not that stupid.”

Steve sighed. “I didn’t ignore your apology. It's okay. I'm not mad.”

“Then why d’you leave?”

“I needed to get away,” he said. Tony flinched at the response.

“Are you angry? I said I’m sorry.”

“I know you did, Tony. And no, I’m not angry. You can't blame me if I still am, though.”

Tony fidgeted in his seat. “Did I say sorry yet?”

Steve shook his head, before sitting on the arm of the sofa, his arms crossed across his chest. “You had Happy drive you here at three in the morning? Is he just waiting outside?”

“He’s used to it. And I sent him off to that 24-hour burger place in Chelsea, I’ll just call him whenever.”

"That's rude."

"He's used to it."

They both fell silent. Tony looked down at the table in front of him, Steve's expectant stare on the back of his neck, but he couldn't think of anything to say. On the coffee table was an open sketchbook with a drawing of the five-story brownstone that was visible just out the window, and a worn paperback of Walt Whitman _._

He still couldn't think of anything to say.

It was a little cold in Steve's apartment, and Tony contemplated suggesting a renovation for the building's heating system.

Still nothing.

Tony wracked his brains to try and see if he knew anything about Whitman from that one humlit course he took at MIT to fulfil some bullshit requirement.

Poetry! That's right, Whitman wrote poetry.

...Nope, nothing.

Finally, Steve let out a restrained sigh.

“I mean it, Tony. It's okay. I know when not to take you seriously, because I know you don’t mean it,” said Steve, scratching the back of his head. “At least, I don’t think you do.”

Pretty low standards, but Tony had always been a take-what-you-can-get type of guy.

He turned to Steve and nodded in enthusiastic agreement, saying, “Oh no, that’s true, that’s _totally_ true. I don’t mean half the things I say, and a quarter of them I actually virulently disagree with. I think I have this disease where if I don’t put my foot in my mouth, I end up saying things I regret because they’re true, instead of things I regret because they’re complete lies.”

Steve raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, that was supposed to be reassuring somehow. In my head it was reassuring. I think it’s the alcohol. I’m really drunk. I know I hide it well, but I’m actually really drunk right now.”

*

“Really? I couldn’t tell,” Steve deadpanned.

If Steve had any sense, he would’ve kept the door closed, ignored Tony’s knocking until he went away. It would’ve been better for the both of them to be away from each other for a while longer. But the man had been too drunk for Steve to leave him out of the apartment in good conscience, which was probably intentional on his part, the bastard.

Well, no one would ever accuse Steve of sense when it came to Tony Stark.

“I’m too drunk for anyone’s sarcasm but my own, Steve," Tony said, continuing his awkward apology. He ran his fingers through his hair and smiled, genuine and self-deprecating as only a person with more alcohol than blood in their system could be. Steve hated that being halfway to alcohol poisoning was the most straightforward price for Tony’s honesty.

“As in, I’m drunk enough to admit I’m drunk, so I'm taking that as my cue to leave, and also it’s already,” he tried to check his watch, squinting, “it’s ‘I can’t even read what fucking time it is anymore’ o’clock.”

But he was still smiling, a slightly manic grin on his face at his own joke, and Steve couldn’t have taken his eyes away from that sight if his life depended on it.

Because if Tony were any more sober, he would’ve noticed how tense Steve was, tight-lipped and spine ramrod straight, fists curled, nails digging into his palms. Fortunately for Steve, Tony was very much not sober and instead of pointing out Steve’s uncharacteristic silence, he just stood and walked across the room with the careless, limber grace of the incredibly intoxicated.

If Tony were any more sober, they wouldn't be in this situation in the first place, come to think about it.

“Want me to drive you?”

“Nah, I’ll just call Happy. You can just leave me on the front steps, if that’s alright.” His hand was on the doorknob when Steve grabbed him by the wrist.

Steve frowned. “I’m not gonna leave you drunk on my front steps at three in the morning, Tony.”

“Well, I’m about thirty seconds away from puking on your carpet.”

“You can stay here.”

“Wow, that’s a terrible idea. Didn’t you hear me about the puking?”

Steve gently steered Tony back to the couch, a hand on his arm and the other on the small of his back. For all that he’d been gearing up to leave not ten seconds ago, Tony didn’t put up much resistance.

 “I feel like this relationship isn’t gonna work if you keep getting me drunk.”

“Tony, you got yourself drunk.”

At this distance, he could see the blown pupils of his eyes, the long lashes that fanned them, and Steve must have it worse than he already dreaded if he’s reduced to waxing poetic about Tony’s eyes. “I was going to go back to the tower in the morning. You didn’t have to go all the way out here.”

“’Course I did. I would’ve psyched myself out of apologising if I waited and then you would think I wasn’t sorry, which I am,” he muttered.

“I knew you were sorry. I already said it’s okay.”

Tony leaned forward and threw an arm around Steve in a rough approximation of a hug, his head tilted to the side and resting on his shoulder. His tone was blithe when he spoke, his voice sleepy-drunk, “None of it's okay, Steve.”

Steve closed his eyes and carefully gave a small exhale, before carefully undraping Tony from around his shoulders.

"I still have the nightmares. The ones where my eyes are blue," Tony said, and Steve's breath hitched. "I still have them and do you know what the worst thing about them is?"

"Tony, I—"

"You're lying on the ground and you're dead because I've killed you. I've killed you so many times I've lost track and I can't—"

He held Tony by his arms, shoulders slumped, and if Steve had let him go, he suspected that Tony would have let himself crumple to the floor entirely. He felt heavy in his hands, his too-lean frame collapsing under the weight of death and sleepless nights bearing down on his neck like an albatross.

( _Making Coleridge references now, Rogers?_ a voice in his head said, sounding suspiciously like Bucky. _You really do have it bad.)_

"It just makes me realise what I can't afford to lose, even though I've lost so much, and I've broken so many things, I didn't want this to be one of them because— "

Steve wrapped his arms around in a hug, a wordless gesture to try to make Tony understand it was okay, he hadn't lost anything. It almost felt like taking advantage, talking to Tony while drunk, because drunk Tony was honest Tony, and he wanted to stop him before he could say anything he regretted.

Knowing Tony, he should probably stop him from saying anything at all.

But Tony kept right on talking, and they were words that Steve had wanted to hear for so long and he couldn't stop him from—

"Steve, I'm in love with you and I don't how it happened and I—I didn't come here to say that, I came here to apologise, because I didn't want to drive you away, because I love you. Shit! I said it again. I'm sorry, I'm sorry for everything—"

"Tony, I—"

"Please, don't, you don't have to leave, you don't have to do anything, just—I can ignore it, it'll go away. I'll make it go away."

"Please don't do that," Steve said in a hushed, hurried voice, and kissed him so Tony wouldn't have the chance to make any more terrible promises.

*

Tony could feel his brain short-circuit at the feel of Steve's lips against his for a few brief seconds, only to be replaced by questions and hesitations and apologies whispered desperately against his mouth, " _God Tony, I—"_ and suddenly that mouth was moving away from his and—

"Oh, _no way_ , you don't get to apologise your way out of this," he said through gritted teeth, grabbing at the slipping thread, one hand grabbing the collar of Steve's shirt to pull him back, the other resting on the back of Steve's neck, fingers splayed and tangling in his hair as he deepened the kiss like a drowning man gasping for air.

Steve's eyes widened in surprise, but took no time in kissing Tony back, and what Steve lacked in skill from experience he more than made up for in enthusiasm. Tony felt his mouth on his own, feverish hot and scalding, its own brand of intoxicating to rival the buzz of alcohol in his bloodstream. Steve's hands cupped his jaw, tilting his head upward as his lips pressed softly but insistently, and Tony didn't know when he opened his mouth to Steve's tongue but he had, everything just hot and messy and desperate and Tony didn't know when he closed his eyes either but he opened them to see long blond lashes and tightly shut eyes, as if Steve was afraid to open them—

Steve's hands travelled down his sides, fingers tracing his ribs and the curve of his waist, to settle on the sharp jut of his hipbones. Tony curved back against the arm of sofa and pulled Steve flush against him, just a solid mass of muscle looming over him, threatening to overwhelm him.

The wool jacket he still wore was suddenly unbearably warm, and he quickly shucked it off, while Steve unknotted the scarf from around Tony's neck. Then he straddled his thighs and splayed his hand on Tony's stomach, fingernails ghosting over the trail of hair on his abdomen, the intention and implication loud and clear enough to make his ears ring. Steve was just everywhere, solid and engulfing, and Tony made a sharp keening noise as Steve's wide-mouthed kisses turned away from his mouth to his jaw to the long column of his throat, his head tossed back to bare the muscle to teeth and tongue.

Tony's eyes fluttered closed as Steve bit on the hollow of his collarbone, his grip tightening in Steve's hair, on the nape of his neck, eliciting a soft, restrained groan from Steve that took away the last remnants of Tony's caution, the bright red warning signs— 

Suddenly, a small, painfully familiar noise made them both go still, the very distracting sensation of Steve's mouth slowly being replaced by a growing sense of dread.

_Ping ping ping._

The alarm continued. Steve let out a pained groan and pulled himself from where he was on top of Tony, while Tony let out a very loud, very profane stream of words cursing SHIELD and the Avengers and Nick Fury, "You gotta be fucking _kidding_ me—"

Steve picked out the ringing cellphone from Tony's back pocket and closed his eyes, a small inhale of breath and the subtly murderous glower the only tells that he was suffering just as much as Tony was. He clicked the button to answer the call, and Tony wasn't sure he didn't crack the screen.

"Rogers."

So Steve nodded at the voice on the other end, while Tony continued to curse his shitty fucking luck and his shitty fucking timing while fighting the violent urge to just throw the phone out the window and continue what he and Steve were doing because that was infinitely more important, oh my god, this was the absolute worst case of blue balls he'd encountered in his entire life, he was going to eviscerate whatever threat it was that decided to attack them at three in the fucking morning just when they've finally—

(— _finally what? what are they now, exactly?_ )

Steve hung up the phone, took another small pause, before handing the phone back to Tony. "The Avengers are being called to assemble. They're meeting us at the tower."

Tony made a face. "Of course we are."

Steve stood up and the transformation from Steve to Captain America-on-alert mode was obvious in the stern set of his shoulders. Except for the slight flush and the messy hair, Steve looked ready to go ten rounds with HYDRA. Tony thought of what _he_ must look like, hair mussed and pupils blown, Steve's markings on his neck, clothing rumpled, face still flushed from alcohol and receding arousal both—and Steve must have registered his appearance at the same time, because he looked at his feet, a hint of a blush on his face. Tony contemplated jumping out the window to just end his suffering already.

"Think you're up for it?" Steve said, holding out a hand to pull Tony to his feet. Tony scowled, straightened his shirt, and picked up his scarf from the floor, knotting it tightly around his neck in a half-serious effort to strangle himself into unconsciousness.

"I'm sure I can still manage to puke all over whoever the bad guy is this time."

"We're taking my bike. It'll be faster than calling Happy over," Steve said levelly, before darting forward to give Tony a small, almost chaste kiss on his lips. "We'll talk about this later."

By the time Tony had recovered from the kiss, Steve was already halfway out his door, and Tony let out a small curse, wishing every possible plague and misfortune over whatever it was trying to destroy New York this time.

It was snowing when they got outside.

Tony didn't remember if it was snowing when he entered Steve's apartment, but it was flurrying by the time they headed out, a light dusting of white on the sidewalk as the start of the motorcycle's engine sounded unnaturally loud in the sleep-quiet streets.

"I'm sorry I don't have a helmet for you ," Steve said, mounting the bike. "Just, I never wear one and I never thought I'd be giving anyone a—ever ridden a motorcycle before?"

"There's one at my place in Malibu. Also I had a girlfriend when I was 23, crazy about bikes, had a garageful of 'em," replied Tony, hopping on the seat behind Steve. "Broke up with me after I crashed her favorite motorcycle and somehow fixed it into a robot."

Steve chuckled softly. "Well, good thing you're not driving this one. Hold on tight."

Tony paused, before he slowly wrapped his arms around his torso, hyperaware of Steve's warmth and the reverberations of the bike between his legs. He decidedly pushed the matter out of his mind, focusing instead on the snowflakes melting on the back of his neck.

Despite its bulk, the bike deftly manoeuvred streets empty of their usual daytime gridlock under Steve's expert handling. Tony couldn't hear much over the roar of engines, but the city they sped past was quiet, and every sound was slightly muffled, New York in the winter, in that witching hour limbo when it was both too late and too early for anyone to still be awake.

The cold whipped around them, and Tony used it as an excuse to hold on even tighter to the front of Steve's jacket, burying his face against Steve's back, just managing to hear a faint heartbeat over the rumbling noise of the motorcycle, strong and reliable, _safe_.

*

"Are you positive we couldn't skip this meeting?" Tony grumbled, taking off his scarf and jacket in the elevator and ruffling the snowflakes out of his hair with one hand. "Maybe it's just Namor pestering the west coast again with his sea monsters and royal doucheyness—,"

Steve slipped his hands in his pockets, and carefully looked at his feet. The floor of the elevator was made of glass, and he counted the levels as they passed each one. "It was a Level 7 code red, Tony. Whatever it is, it sounded serious."

"I will never forgive them."

Despite the current situation, Steve felt like his veins were singing, a sort of giddiness that would be totally embarrassing upon closer inspection. It was a terrifying sort of happiness, a tense-wire joy teetering over disbelief, as though if he blinked in the next second, he'd find himself back in his apartment, drawing the fire escape of the building across the street from him.

"JARVIS, a headcount of the people in the building please?" Tony spoke, shaking Steve out of his reverie. A nervous tic had him tapping his fingers on his thigh, betraying the nonchalant expression on his face as JARVIS' voice welcomed them home. Steve shook his head, then smiled, taking Tony's hand.

It was worth it to see Tony's face, pale from the cold, turn red as he suddenly became flustered. "Uhh, Steve?"

Steve squeezed his hand reassuringly. "I'm not going anywhere, Tony. We'll deal with the threat, and then we'll deal with...us."

"I—yeah. I mean, I know that." Tony looked down at their hands. "It's just, we're finally getting somewhere, so  _of course_ that's when shit happens."

"I know."

"I'm gonna make Fury a trophy for 'Best Cockblock In History', and then I'm going to punch him in the face with it."

"Whatever makes you feel better, Tony."

He gave Tony one last reassuring squeeze of his hand before the elevator doors swooshed open on the lowest residential floor, and they turned right to enter the conference room that had since been commandeered into the Avengers' main mission centre. Clustered around the table that took up most of the room, Steve saw Bruce, Clint, and Sharon, along with several other SHIELD agents.

A vidscreen was mounted on the wall at the far end of the room, where a projection of Nick Fury was currently speaking, intimidating scowl in place.

"Honey, I'm home," Tony interrupted. It wasn't his best line, but he was tired and his voice bespoke of his recently-drunk state.

He sat down on a chair at the head of the table, and sprawled back into his chair as only Tony Stark could, the last of his previously good mood leaving to make its way for a really good sulk (and nothing as mundane as a global threat was going to deter Tony from sulking).

Not being directed at him, Steve just found it strangely endearing.

(And okay, maybe there was the element of confirmation that Tony wanted this— _them—_ as much as he did.)

"Hey, quick question, why do we have to be actually here while you're just a holographic head?" Tony said.

"Because I don't need to be, Stark. I—"

"Like what is it, bad hair day?" His voice was blithe but Steve could feel Tony's eyes darting in his direction every now and then as he spoke, and he tried his level best not to smile at that. "I mean we all have those, Nicky-poo—"

Fury's one good, holographic eye twitched. " _I_ have a meeting in two hours with the President about things that are way above even the clearance you hacked for yourself, Stark, so I'm not wasting my precious time explaining myself to you. Banner issued the alarm, and Black Widow is on her way over. I'm putting her in charge of this op."

Tony turned to Bruce, who only smiled at Tony's admittedly weak glare. "This was your fault, green bean?" he grumped.

"Sorry, Tony. But SHIELD brought scones?" he said, pointing to the plate of pastries on the table. Tony narrowed his eyes at the offending pastries, before leaning forward and snatching the whole plate into his lap.

"If this had waited until you and Steve worked out your issues, the world would've been destroyed a couple of times over," said Clint.

"But no pressure, gentlemen," said Natasha, who came through the doors and snatched a couple of scones from Tony's lap before Steve even registered her entrance.

"Why can't you make noise when you move, like a normal person?" Tony said.

"How else would I have filched one of these from you?" she replied, biting into her scone while throwing the other at Clint, all without looking in his direction. "Anyway, we promise we'll all be here for you once we get rid of our latest global threat," she said, with a small wink in Steve's direction.

"Who is it this time?" asked Steve, desperately not blushing and hoping he and Tony weren't as obvious as he felt.

Natasha nodded, expression turning serious. "Agent Thirteen, if you will."

Steve met Sharon's eyes as she stepped forward, and gave her a sheepish smile, which was more gracefully reciprocated from her end. Then Sharon cleared her throat and with a swipe of her hand, brought up a topographic map of what Steve recognised as Latveria.

"At 0200 hours this morning, SHIELD intelligence intercepted an encrypted missive from Doomstadt to Madripoor, concerning the transport of a finished device," Sharon explained. With a second gesture of her fingers, she replaced the hologram of Latveria with another hologram: the schematics of Doom's mysterious machine.

"This," Sharon said, her lips curled in a hint of distaste as she spoke the next words, "is the Overkill Horn. SHIELD intelligence has known about the existence of Doom's project for quite some time, but without further information we could neither figure out what it was for, or obtain UN approval for a full investigation on the possible manufacture of WMDs. Along with our own scientists, we've asked Mr. Stark and Dr. Banner to look at the plans as well," she said, nodding in Bruce's direction.

Bruce pushed his glasses up his nose. "Thanks to Agent Thirteen's intelligence recon, I was able to assemble the missing components with what Tony and I have managed to reverse-engineer over the past months. Nanite technologies and AIs aren't my forte," he said, bringing up further plans to the table, glowing schematics that Steve could hardly make head or tail of, "but Tony should be able to confirm our hypotheses."

Steve stole a glance over to where Tony was leaning forward in his seat, the scones half-forgotten in his lap, his eyes wide in equal parts fascination and disbelief. "A techno-organic intelligence that transmits in universal machine code, which means it can communicate with any technological system on the planet."

He turned to Bruce, a painful smile on his face. "Bruce, baby, tell me this is a joke."

Bruce shook his head. "Sorry, Tony. But even my sense of humor isn't this gloomy."

"Well, what is it?" Clint asked, but Steve was already putting the pieces together, drawing from the cultural and historical crash course of what he's learned of this century.

"Modern industry, finance, medicine," Tony recited tonelessly, "Blueprints of people's whole identities. Codes and safety protocols guarding the detonation sequences to nuclear arsenals that could destroy the world a thousand times over... all built on zeroes and ones."

Steve felt his blood run cold. "And what did the rest of the message say? Who was Latveria's contact in Madripoor?"

"We managed to trace the message to the commissioner of the Overkill Horn," Sharon replied, and with a final swipe of her fingers, brought up an awfully familiar insignia: a gleaming skull, a mass of serpents in place of a jaw.

Was it ever going to be anything else but HYDRA?

"So suit up, gentlemen. We have to stop the end of civilization," said Natasha.

*

Tony would've felt a lot better about this whole thing if Bruce had come with them, but the population density of Madripoor was somewhere in the ballpark of 20,000 people per square mile, so Tony's initial suggestion of air-dropping the Hulk on the HYDRA compound and just letting him do his thing was (regretfully) shot down.

It's a shame that Thor was in Asgard, of all times.

 _So._ The primary objective being stealth without compromising firepower, alpha-team was Iron Man and Captain America, with Hawkeye and Agent Thirteen as backup, and Black Widow coordinating the whole shebang.

"You know, I gotta say, black's not really my color," said Tony as he recalibrated his gauntlets for the umpteenth time. The mark 27 was a stealth version of his regular suit, black-plated, lighter and thinner, with a prototype electromagnetic jammer that worked for five minute windows.

"You look fine, Tony," said Steve. He was wearing those stupid brown leather wrist-gloves and that stupid dark blue uniform _again_ , making Tony want to forget HYDRA's bullshit even more and just maybe steal Steve away, get to know that uniform better.

"How did they even convince Doom to make something for them? I'd think he'd say it's beneath him, or whatever."

Sharon shrugged from where she was sitting next to Steve across the quinjet. "SHIELD isn't sure, but we're just guessing Latveria's capital reserve doesn't replenish itself." Then she paused her adjusting of the settings on her high-powered laser rifle.

"So what can it do?" she said, with a gesture to his suit. "Just out of curiosity."

Tony smirked, before setting the faceplate down and with a click of the controls on his forearm, disappeared into thin air.

Sharon let out an impressed whistle. "Well, I'll be."

"The jammer sends out a signal that distorts light at a designated wavelength," said Tony as he shimmered back into view. "Set to the same frequency as visible light, I'm effectively invisible for about three hundred seconds. Pretty cool, huh?"

"Good thing too, since, we're going to need your best toys for this mission, Tony," said Natasha, ducking in from the cockpit. "Layout places the Overkill Horn at the centre of the complex, several hundred feet underground. We can get past the upper levels undetected, but the four of us will have our hands tied holding them all back once they register our presence."

Natasha fixed him with a stare. "You go in, you disable the Horn, and then you're back out."

Tony nodded, and yeah, so he's going against a technopathic hivemind while wearing the most technologically sophisticated suit of armor in the world, it's a _great_ idea.

The same thought must have occurred to Steve, who frowned. "Wouldn't Tony be the most vulnerable of us to the Overkill Horn?"

"Yes," said Natasha, "but any weapon we can give you with enough firepower to destroy it in the timeframe we have will be just as vulnerable to being taken over."

"My AI's pretty advanced too, Cap," Tony interjected. "Besides, we need JARVIS to make sure that the Overkill Horn's disengaged from anything before we destroy it. HYDRA's dramatic enough for self-destruct protocols that could take most of the southern hemisphere with it."

Then he gave Steve his most carefree smile. "I can do this, Steve."

Steve still looked much too grim, but he nodded anyway.

*

It all goes according to plan until it doesn't.

The HYDRA base was a multi-tiered complex, a conspicuously unassuming building above ground, with most of the actual compound underneath. Tony took point, maps of the compound on his HUD, the rest of the team directly behind him, incapacitating security to make for a clean get-away.

Comms on this op were out of question, and were reserved for emergencies, leaving Tony alone as he made his way through the halls, mostly invisible.

But still, when he reached the Overkill Horn with pretty much zero resistance, he thought they maybe should've considered the premise that HYDRA didn't think it _needed_ any protecting.

"Doom, you tacky bastard," he said to himself.

The Overkill Horn sat in the middle of a large, suspiciously empty atrium, a pulsating mass of wires moulded vaguely into the shape of a giant brain, blinking green and blue as data raced through its information banks. Warning red glowed at the edges of the HUD as JARVIS registered the Horn poking at the peripheries of the armor's security.

"The Overkill Horn is engaging my server's primary anti-viral protocols. Firewall 7203 failure. Firewall 7202 failure. Protocol breach estimated in less than 10 minutes, 22 seconds, sir," JARVIS spoke.

Tony opened the compartment of the armor's left forearm to take out what looked like a small metal spider. The robot's spindly legs propelled it to the side of what looked like the main server, where the bot splayed itself flat and attached itself to the surface. "Alright, JARVIS. Time to make daddy proud."

"To the best of my abilities, sir," JARVIS replied.

Classic art of war stuff—turn your enemy's strengths into his weaknesses. Spider-Dummy let out a high-pitched whine as its brute-force algorithms connected to the server and parsed through terabytes upon terabytes of information in the Overkill Horn's processors, corrupting everything it could touch.

09:45 blinked at the corner of his screen.

This was their primary safety measure: disable the Overkill Horn in case it tries to do something drastic instead of just blowing it up. Tony ran to what constituted as the frontal lobe of the brain, his palms spread in anticipation of JARVIS' signal for the all-clear. 08:31.

Now it was a test to see which of them had the better defense system. "Firewall 5980 failure. Firewall 5978 failure."

"Come on, come on," Tony muttered under his breath. Then he bit his tongue to keep from engaging comms and asking Natasha for the rest of the team's status.

Then suddenly, at 06:55, alarm klaxons started ringing, painfully loud even with the suit's sound filters. But Tony barely had time to worry about his hearing before thick tendrils of cable shot out from amidst the tangle of wires, more organic than synthetic in their sentience, and aimed straight for Tony before he could bring up the repulsors to deflect them.

"Agh!" The prehensile cords wrapped around his neck and torso, his hands occupied with pulling them away from his head. The tendrils have somehow fused themselves to parts of the armor, thick cables over his chest, coiling around his ankles, up his legs, hair-thin wires fanning over his eyes, sprawling like veins and seeping under the armor plates like a cancer.

His head was pounding, his senses suddenly overloaded with light and sound as the HUD started going nuts, lines of code interspersed with images flashing too fast to be intelligible, forcing him to close his eyes, but there was nothing he could do about the gargle of deafening static from his comms—

JARVIS' voice broke through the barrage of noise, urgent worry in every artificial syllable of his voice, "Sir, armor safety has been compromised. Viral override systems are attempting to subsume my systems via the suit—"

"Engage protocol 0001-87-cap-20!" Tony choked out.

The helmet and torso piece disassembled around him, along with the armor over his legs, where they were immediately pulled away by the wires, buried into the Overkill Horn's main mass. Now almost completely exposed in just his black undersuit and entirely vulnerable, he wrangled the thick cable still around his neck, splayed the palm of his left repulsor flat on its side and fired point-blank. The machine made a high-pitched whirr, as if in pain, and Tony blindly fired another repulsor shot in the same direction as he rolled away.

He ran and pressed his back to the wall, turned his gauntlets up, and hoped to hell this worked.

"Armor, initiate override 22-30A6-pepper! Initiate containment sequence," Tony shouted over the din of crackling electricity and overloading servos, "strawberries!"

God, he really needed to have a talk with JARVIS about their naming protocols, but it did have a certain logic to it.

Suddenly, the brain's mass of tendrils stilled, several moments of tense uncertainty, before the whole machine let out an inhuman (what other kind, really?) shriek. Bright explosions rocked the room as the armor's self-destruct destroyed the Horn from within the mass of wires.

He didn't plan on destroying the Overkill Horn this way, because he _liked_ the stealth suit, but hey, it worked, don't knock it.

Now he just had to find the rest of the team, or else fight his way out of the compound with just his gauntlets and zero flight capacity. Okay, okay, no pressure.

He couldn't go back the way he came, but the configuration of compound's layout was roughly symmetrical, and theoretically he should be able to retrace his path to an exit on the other end of the compound. Without the support struts that were built in to the armor, the gauntlets dragged on his arms like a pair of weights, heavy and unwieldy, but Tony could hardly discard his only remaining weapon. He ran as fast as he could, trying to ignore the burn in his shoulders.

It was either luck that he didn't run into many HYDRA agents, or it was a trap. Dispatching a green-clad agent with a repulsor shot to the back, Tony thought it was a good thing he didn't have any other options but to go forward.

He rounded a corner into a hall with high ceilings, and saw Steve.

Steve was kneeling on the ground several feet in front of him, his shield lying limply in his hands. The star on his chest was splattered red, his eyes blank and terrifyingly blue.

 _No._ Tony felt the taste of bile in his throat.

 _Look at what you've done,_ a voice whispered, the same voice that haunted every nightmare, every shallow breath in the dark after waking, every glint of gold and green caught in passing glances, in the sinister shadows that dogged his steps.

Tony's heart beat an angry tempo against his ribs. "No no no no..."

Everything turned hazy, and the only things in sharp focus were the blue and red but in all the wrong ways. The edges of his vision blurred, his whole world tunneling to the blood on Steve's chest.

_Someone like you can't protect anyone._

He walked forward, breaking into a run as Steve ( _Steve's body_ ) slumped forward, catch him, it's not too late—

Laughter rang in his ears. _When have you ever been able to protect anything precious to you?_

There was a flash of silver at the corner of his eyes, protruding from the dark, lethal and deadly and waiting, but none of that mattered because Steve—he had to be okay, Tony can't—

An arrow crosses his path, embedding itself on the ground between him and Steve, stopping Tony in his tracks. The world turned clear, his ears suddenly ringing with noise, and everything felt less like he was drowning.

Steve had disappeared, and a man fell forward from the shadows, an arrow jutting out of his back. From behind him, Clint stepped forward, another arrow knocked ready in his bow.

"Tony!" Clint knelt in front of him. "Tony, come on, are you okay?"

"What the fuck just happened?" Tony asked breathlessly. His head had cleared, but he could still taste his heart in his throat. "Where's Steve?"

Clint's mouth was set in a grim line. "Steve's okay, he's not here, Tony. You were—none of it was real."

Tony closed his eyes, trying to banish the lingering mirages behind his eyelids. Then he looked at the man on the floor, to the empty spot where Steve ( _not Steve never Steve_ ) was.

"Who was he?" Tony asked.

"Well, he used to be Marvin Flumm," said Clint, pulling Tony to his feet by his shoulders. "Defected SHIELD operative, now apparently an agent of HYDRA known as Mentallo. Limited psionic capabilities. That's how he was controlling you, making you jump into his line of fire."

Tony winced. "He wasn't controlling me. He was...making me see things."

Clint nodded, with far more understanding than Tony was comfortable commiserating with.

"Come on, Iron Man. We've rigged the whole place to blow in about two minutes. Nat's set up an extraction point."

Clenching his hands as tightly as the gauntlets would let him, Tony shook off the dread and fear as best as he could.

"Well, after you, Hawkeye."

They ran, Clint taking point since Tony's sense of direction was now completely disorientated.

"I was going to ask you why you weren't answering your comm, but now I can see why."

"Well, I was too busy being molested by advanced technology. And completing mission objective by myself, you're welcome by the way."

Tony blasted the people that pursued them, and at some point, Clint's quiver ran out of arrows and he had to switch it for a HYDRA gun. The number of agents that they encountered were steadily increasing the closer they got to the outside world, and Tony suspected it could only be worse once they get outside.

"It was awful. Cap kept nagging us on comm."

The sunlight filtering through the half-obstructed entrance was both a welcome relief and a sight of dread.

It lasted about five seconds before Clint pushed him out of the way of the building collapsing nearly on top of them when they got out onto the streets.

Tony could faintly hear the whirr of the quinjet's engines over the booming crashes, but he couldn't see where because of the thick, billowing dust cloud that had risen up and swallowed the ground. The direction that Clint had been leading them towards was now blocked with rubble, and he ran across the length of the formerly-upright building, trying to find a break in the blockage.

He needed a plan. A brilliant, cunning, Stark-patented plan of genius that would get him out of this mess.

A collapsing strut not fifteen feet behind him rattled Tony out of his thoughts, and made him reconsider his options—fuck that, he needed a plan. _Any_ plan.

The sight of huge men with huge guns greeted him as he blasted through the rubble, and the first thing Tony thought was _shit!_ , quickly followed by _holy shit!_

In the immediate aftermath of the compound nearly falling on top of him, Tony acknowledged several facts: he was gonna miss his ride. Madripoor was swimming with green-clad HYDRA goons. The only thing he had left of his armor were the gauntlets.

Best-case scenario, Clint and the rest of the team had made it to the quinjet and he was the only one left behind.

As the HYDRA guys loomed towards him, Tony could only hope that the rest of the team had gotten out. (He hoped Steve was really okay.)

Almost as if he was summoned by his thoughts, Steve came out of nowhere and tackled him to the ground, behind the cover of debris, gunfire ripping apart the air where Tony was standing not two seconds ago.

"What are you doing here?!" Tony shouted from where he was flattened on the ground. As fast as he had appeared, Steve was already standing again, his back against their cover, before ducking and aiming some shots of his own at the men firing at them.

"I missed rendezvous," he said. "And you did too, I guess."

"What about everyone? Hawkeye?"

"Clint and Sharon both made it. But it means we're the only ones left out here," said Steve grimly. "No support or backup incoming."

Steve looked harried, if not seriously injured; the worst of his wounds was a purpling bruise on the corner of his jaw and a gash on his thigh. He looked a lot better compared to Tony, who, in cataloguing his injuries, arrived at the conclusion that he felt as though his entire existence was repeatedly punched in the face, and he could feel some blood trickling at his hairline, along with a couple of nasty serrations on his cheek and neck from the Overkill Horn's tentacles.

Tony stamped down on his ( _overwhelming, overpowering_ ) relief at seeing that Steve was really okay and tried to focus on the problem at hand. Now that they were out in the open, there was a lot more screaming, of the 'public-in-danger' variety of chaos. Tony didn't want to hurt innocent people, especially women and children, though Natasha was pretty much proof that neither being young nor female was a guarantee of innocence.

"Fuckfuckfuckfuck _okay_ , I'm grounded, we have my repulsors and your laser rifle between the two of us and the entire population of Madripoor—what are our options?"

“Widow is giving me an ETA—’Go to Hightown, the _Pearl_.’” Steve said, blinking, his finger on the comm in his ear.

The small precisions-grade grenade in the right-arm gauntlet's compartment, thrown in the vicinity of the huge men with guns, would certainly take care of that problem under most circumstances, but there were the aforementioned innocent people to consider, even if their innocence was merely theoretical (and in the case of Madripoorean citizens, incredibly dubious).

“The _Madripoor Pearl_? You mean the hotel on the _other_ side of the city? And one of the most obvious locations on this entire island?”

“If Natasha says we're covered there, it should be fine.”

"Oh, yeah, no, sounds like a terrific plan, perfect really," replied Tony, risking a look over the side of their makeshift barricade. "Like my doctor was saying, I should really do more to be active, get my blood running and all—"

An explosion swallowed the rest of his sentence, and despite the ringing in his ears, Tony heard Steve give a small gasp, and red bloomed in the corner of his eyes.

*

It all went to hell when klaxons started blaring, as HYDRA agents swarmed into the compound, his party cut off from Tony as they were surrounded on all sides. Clint had been trailing them at a distance, and now they were separated from him too.

"Captain, we've lost contact with Iron Man," said Natasha in his ear, sharp, without inflection.

Steve froze. "What do you mean lost contact? Is he—"

"We tracked his vitals through the armor signature, and now there's no sign of it. Which means the armor is disabled or—either way we have to assume the worst. We're initiating our back-up plan. Cap and Agent Thirteen, you set up chargers—"

 "What about Tony!? We can't just leave him!"

"Cap, I need you focused. I need this compound down no matter what. Hawkeye, run recon and find Tony!"

He and Sharon stood back to back, and with a swing of the butt of his laser rifle, knocked out the three agents closest to them while Sharon took out the men behind them with a round of rapid fire. Then he got down on the ground and took down several men with a sweeping kick to their legs. Sharon used his shoulder as a boost, and smashed her knee into the face of the agent who had been aiming a gun at his head. Then she threw a charger that stuck to the ceiling above them.

"Steve, come on!" Sharon pulled him up to his feet and they ran.

Eight charges at strategic points to bring down the compound, and then a time window of four minutes to make their way out and onto the quinjet. Seven charges, now. Steve counted them down, resolutely not thinking of what else he wanted ( _needed_ ) to do. Between him and Sharon, the agents went down like dominoes, and the charges went up where they were supposed to, six, five, four.

A bullet grazed his thigh as they set up the third-to-last charge, but he hardly felt it.

Two left. One.

"Okay, that's the last of them!" Sharon said into her comm.

"Any news on Tony?" Steve said.

"Clint's got him, Steve," said Natasha. "Move to the south of the compound! Heat signatures indicate that as the least populated area. I'll have a limited window where I can pick you guys up, but it's a bottleneck, if we stay any longer they'll tear us to shreds—"

Orders were simple, Steve knew how to follow orders. Blood trickled down his leg as they sprinted, but they made it out to where Natasha flew the jet very low, a little over a minute left to the countdown.

He felt like he was holding his breath for an intolerable period of time.

When Clint arrived at the quinjet without Tony, the breath stuttered in his lungs. When he caught a glimpse of Tony disappearing behind the collapsing building, his armor gone except for his gauntlets, he didn't even give himself time to ponder what had happened to the rest of the suit before he vaulted off the rapidly ascending quinjet. Behind Steve, voices called to him, a medley of Clint, Natasha and Sharon's voices all shouting some variety of "stop!"

He rolled into his landing on the rubble-strewn street, the quinjet already twenty feet above him. Pushing the comm to his ear, he said, "We can't leave him behind, but the jet is too vulnerable in the city. Widow, please designate secondary location for our retrieval."

"God damn you, Steve," was the muttered reply from his comm. "Make your way to the _Pearl_ , and make sure you're both safe!"

The dust of the collapsing building was still settling when Steve caught the sound of pursuing gunfire. As the street cleared, he saw Tony standing in the middle of the street, his arms at his sides as he faced down a cadre of HYDRA agents.

He tackled Tony to the ground, bruising his jaw painfully on his botched landing as he tried not to crush Tony under his weight. Underneath him, Tony's eyes were bright and wide with surprise, before they narrowed and his whole expression turned into a half-snarl. "What are you doing here?"

Steve tried not to sigh too audibly at Tony worrying about him when _he_ was the one who was almost gunned down moments ago.

"I missed rendezvous," said Steve. It was technically true. "And you did too, I guess."

Tony immediately asked Steve about the others and so he told him the plan to make their way to the _Pearl_ Hotel. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was all they managed to scrounge up on the fly.

Steve was pleased to see that at least Tony wasn't hurt enough that he missed the opportunity for sarcasm. "Oh, yeah, no, sounds like a terrific plan, perfect really. Like my doctor was saying, I should really do more to be active, get my blood running and all—"

The blast interrupted Tony's scowling mid-sentence. A gutted car on the side of the road that had exploded by accident in the crossfire.

Steve blinked the dust out of his eyes, vaguely registering a stinging pain at his side. He opened his eyes to Tony's panicked expression.

"Are you okay?" Tony shouted at him, or at least that's what Steve thought he said; his ears were out of commission where shrapnel had hit his comm and shattered it, so he could only read his lips. He pried its mangled remains off his ear as Tony ran his hands over him, frantically checking for injuries, and Steve didn't know how to convince him he was fine except maybe kissing him.

Okay, Steve was a tactical genius and could think of a few other solutions, but he was still a little light-headed, and it seemed to calm Tony down. A tang of copper from the cut on his lip (or Tony's?), his fingers light on Tony's jaw—it could only last a few seconds, but every second was worth it.

Steve broke the kiss as quickly as he initiated it. He could feel blood trickling out of his ear as his hearing slowly returned. "I'm fine," he said. "It's only shrapnel, I'll just have to get it out, okay? I'm fine."

The kiss had the desired effect. Tony still looked too worried, but he nodded, a determined look in his eye.

Steve took a deep breath, before grabbing hold of the hem of his shirt and raising it to look at the damage. It was a long cut along his left side, shallow—hardly the worst injury he’d suffered, but the wound burned as though barb wire was cutting into it (the description wasn't just poetry, Steve could testify from experience that both sensations were pretty similar). He could see the culprit embedded in the wound, a jagged piece of rebar that had broken off, caught in the blast. He unsheathed a small knife from his belt and, without any hesitation, pried out the shard.

Tony's eyes grew large as he watched Steve perform the operation. "That's really disgusting, but also really hot how you don't even flinch."

Steve drew his hand away from the cut and nodded. "I've had worse," he said. "We should go, but we need something to cover our tracks."

Tony nodded at the familiar expression on Steve's face, expressionless and calm, the face of someone absorbing that slight edge of pain with the pragmatism of someone used to far worse. "I think I have something. Then we have a fifteen-second window to get away."

"That'll have to do."

At this point, the streets had emptied. Tony set a timer on a small grenade, and threw it towards the remaining gunners. The deafening noise of the explosion preceded the sound of breaking glass. Steve counted five seconds in his head, before running to the middle of the street and dislodging a maintenance hole cover to the sewers, Tony following behind him.

The icy water was waist-high, castoff from the recent rains, probably, so at least they weren't wading through thick sludge. Steve absolutely tried not to think about what it was doing to the gashes on his thigh and torso—he's immune to most ordinary infection anyway.

After around thirty minutes of this, Tony pointed a finger upwards, to the exit grate right above their heads.

The streets here were quieter, the explosions farther in the distance. The _Madripoor Pearl_ loomed conspicuously over everything else, tacky in its opulence, juxtaposed as it was to abject poverty not even a couple of miles out from its cobblestoned courtyard.

"Great," said Tony, eying the security detail on the front gates, high-tech security cameras, along with patrols of big, looming guards who would look right at home in green HYDRA uniforms (and probably used to). "Now what?"

"How do you feel about a brute force approach?"

"You take out the guards, I take out the cameras?"

"Then we zoom up the elevator to the roof." Steve desperately hoped that the quinjet would be there.

"You're just really sexy when you're being all tactical and genius-y," said Tony drily, but powering up the gauntlet anyway. "Short-range EMP in five."

Steve cocked the laser rifle to recharge it. "Beat you to the line?"

"This is a young man's game, Steve, baby," Tony grunted. "I'm perfectly comfortable with admitting I am too old for this shit."

*

Blue pulsed out from his fingertips as Tony ran forward, aiming at the cameras and the guards' commsets both, trusting his cover entirely to Steve. They make it to the glass-door entrances with only the barest smattering of gunfire.

The lobby was empty except for a bored-looking receptionist, the _Pearl_ 's guests having probably made themselves scarce when word got out that there were SHIELD agents in the city. Any dirty deals they had planned could probably wait 'til tomorrow. The girl's eyes widened with recognition as they approached, and Tony tried to zap her unconscious before she could act, but the security button had already been pressed.

"Shit, uhh, Steve?"

"We go on as planned," he replied, jogging towards the elevators.

"High-speed elevators, fifty-five floors—a hundred and twenty seconds to the roof."

"Too slow, they'll disable them before we get there."

"Or they'll be right here, comfortably awaiting your arrival," a woman's voice rang out, heels clacking on the marble floor.

"Welcome to the _Pearl_ , gentlemen," said Madame Hydra. "How do you like your accommodations?"

She laughed as she gestured to her squadron of HYDRA goons, all armed to the teeth and looking a lot less tired than Tony felt.

"Pretty lame. I didn't even get a mint on my pillow," said Tony.

Steve stepped forward, shielding Tony with the sheer width of his shoulders. "The view could be better."

"Rudest personnel I've ever met."

"Quiet," snapped Madame Hydra. "I don't have time for your jokes."

"You kinda set yourself up for that, though," said Tony, leering as lecherously as he could manage over Steve's shoulder. Behind him, he traced shorthand onto Steve's palm with one fingertip, a system they'd practiced for the times when comms were untrustworthy. _Don’t panic, have plan._

 _Suicidal?_ Steve asked back. Tony was impressed how his stenography had the same deadpan inflection it would’ve had if he said it aloud.

_Not on purpose._

He needed a diversion, something to occupy Madame Hydra while his improvisations powered up enough for what he was about to attempt.

“How did you know to intercept us here?” Steve had gotten that the key was to keep the enemy talking for as long as possible, stall for time as Tony got ready. Which wasn't hard, because come _on_ —she called herself Madame Hydra.

“Do you take me for a fool, Rogers? The encryption on your communication frequencies were laughably easy to override.”

"Guess I'll just have to see Fury about that," said Steve.

"And so? Then he could grovel to the Security Council for more funding?"

"You could try it. Maybe then you could afford to better train your men," replied Steve.

Madame HYDRA narrowed her eyes. "HYDRA is far from the same organization you _died_ trying to defeat, Captain."

"If I could do it once, I could do it again."

She laughed, and Tony had to admit, that was a pretty good evil laugh. "What do we have to fear from you, an old-fashioned relic of American imperialism? Or am I supposed to be afraid of your pet engineer and his obsolete technology?"

 _Obsolete_? "Woah, ouch, low blow there, yeah?"

"You've seen what we can do, with the Overkill Horn," she said with a smirk.

"You mean the Overkill Horn we just disabled?" Tony replied.

Behind Steve's frame, Tony recalibrated the settings on his gauntlets as surreptitiously as he could manage. He might not have his full armor, but if he couldn't even MacGyver something as simple as an electricity overcharge, then he might as well just give up and retire from the superhero biz (but you know, somewhere nice, like some French chateau maybe, and definitely with Steve, who will be dressed in only a short toga and a bowl of grapes at all times).

"The Overkill Horn is only one of our many endeavours!" Madame Hydra said, her voice turning angry. "We can always make more! We are HYDRA! Cut off one head—"

Tony flexed his fingers, disengaged the gauntlets from his hands, and pressed the sequence.

The gauntlets dropped to the floor, compressing into a compact square as it made a whirring noise. Then it let out a blue pulse of light, and within seconds all the lights in their sector of the city went dazzlingly bright. His vision went white, whiter than the flash of pain when you take knuckles to the face, cracking the orbital bone, before everything went dark. In the ensuing chaos, guns were fired, and he heard Madame Hydra screaming, “No, you idiots, don’t just fire in the dark, what if you had shot _me_!? Find them!”

Still half-blind, Tony grabbed Steve’s wrist and led them to the backrooms of the hotel. The roof would be covered in HYDRA henchmen by now, and so he'd crossed it off as a lost cause. He only hoped that Natasha figured that out in time too.

The backrooms were thankfully empty, most of HYDRA's forces having entered the hotel the same way they came in, not bothering to post any lookouts outside. Tony had Madame Hydra's oversight (or more likely, arrogance) to thank for that.

"What was that?" Steve asked mid-escape, blinking lights out of his eyes.

"Long-range EMP. I overloaded my gauntlets with all the energy from the RT they could store in their local reserves to take out Hightown's electrical grid," Tony replied, trying to even his breathing. "Thought it was a nice going-away present."

They ran, careful not to trip forward in the dark, though in what direction, Tony wasn’t sure. Steve had taken point by then, leading them through the winding streets and shanties, and thank _god_ for enhanced memory—he had no time to ask Steve where they were going, only that he seemed to know where, and Tony trusted that.

The moonlight pared the night down to its bare bones, cutting everything into black and white and the eerie red of street lanterns. The sound of footsteps and gunshots breathed down their necks, nipping at their heels.

They ran and ran, until the road gave way to a concrete riverbank.

Tony let himself breathe easy for the first time at the familiar noise, just audible above the sound of moving water.

The quinjet flew not a hundred feet out from the riverbank.

*

“How did you know to make your way to the river?” Tony asked.

Steve could just barely make out the quinjet hovering over the water, all its lights off, an area of black that was just a shade darker than the space around it.

Steve shrugged. “Natasha wouldn’t have told us to go somewhere as obvious as the _Pearl_ without a back-up plan. I didn’t have to know what that plan was exactly. The next credible means of escape if not by air was by water—”

Gunfire cut Steve off, and his thoughts strangely calm and detached, _we were so close_.

This time his wound was much deeper. Having situated himself on the edge of the concrete riverbank, Steve fell forward to the water, half-conscious.

The river was cold, freezing. Moonlight pierced the murky water, and everything underneath looked ghostly and pale. Steve tried to move his arms, his legs, his _lungs_ in an effort to breathe, but they all felt numb.

A splash told him that Tony had jumped in after him. He wanted to shake him, ask _what are you doing?_ He should get away while he could.

He wanted to kiss him too, but there wasn't time for that.

A hand grabbed his wrist and interrupted his musings. The breath he gasped as they broke the surface of the water was almost as painful as the drowning. The next few minutes passed in a blur, the familiar whir of the quinjet’s engines, the twang of Clint's blow and Sharon's laser rifle, then Tony’s harsh breathing as he tried to swim with Steve’s deadweight in tow—

"Tony!" a voice he recognised as Natasha spoke.

“Nat,” Tony said, his teeth chattering as he hauled Steve up to the floor of the quinjet. “He's hurt, they shot him—you have to do something—"

There was something incredibly heartbreaking in the way his voice broke, and he was numb with cold and blood-loss but he needed to make Tony feel better, reassure him somehow.

"Natasha, help him," Tony said.

Steve looked at Tony, brushed his fingers up to his jaw, to his lips blue with cold. Tony gripped his hand in his. "It's okay, Tony."

He tried to take in all the details of Tony, the calluses of the hand on his, the laugh lines around brown eyes that were large with worry, the water clinging to his eyelashes.

Steve closed his eyes and smiled. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the Overkill Horn/a lot of the Madripoor mission lovingly ripped off from Cap&IM 633-635 and IM v4, among other easter eggs.


	6. Chapter 6

Steve woke up and every part of him was sore to the touch.

Which, okay, the fact that he woke up at all was by itself a huge relief, but after that first slow drift into wakefulness that relief dwindled very rapidly, each ache and bruise of his muscles jostling to take its place.

Sterile white sheets and plain light-blue walls. Steve was in the room of the hospital wing that Tony had appropriated after it became clear that this saving-the-world gig was going to be a disturbingly regular thing for them. But for all their alarmingly frequent brushes with danger and death, none of the Avengers really spent all that much time in civilian hospitals. When they got injured, Natasha and Clint tended to disappear deep into the lower levels of the Helicarrier, where the medbays were, and return several days later, miraculously and suspiciously looking none the worse for wear. Bruce didn't actually get injured in battle as the Hulk, just incapacitated at worst. Thor was, well, Thor.

That left Tony as the one who got injured the most often, something that Steve profoundly failed to not notice. He shifted slightly in his bed and turned to look at the machine next to him, monitoring every rise and fall of his heartbeat.

Doctors and nurses came in and out, taking diagnostics and evaluating his condition, which Steve had gleaned to be stable, although it hardly felt like it. He had apparently been a lot worse though, and Steve supposed it didn't hurt to take their word for it ( _wrong,_ everything hurt right now). It took a couple of days for Steve to fully shake off the half-dreamy lull of painkillers, and by then he was pretty much sick to death of lying on his back all the time. But he had three broken ribs on his left side and a cracked sternum that meant he couldn’t turn or sit up or assume any other position aside from lying on his back for most of the duration of his recovery. The ceiling was fascinating, really, but he had already memorized every irregular whorl in the wood after a particularly riveting afternoon, and he was bored out of his skull.

He was also uncharacteristically cranky, due to being slowly weaned off his sedatives, and the gradual return of sensation had made him cognizant of the following: first, his injuries hurt like hell, and second, Natasha had terrible bedside manners.

The first person who came to see him was Natasha, on the third day, when the doctors had deemed him fit for human contact.

"It's also the first day they don't have you on enough painkillers to knock out a horse," said Natasha matter-of-factly. Steve winced, because his injuries made sure he knew that.

"I'm fine," said Steve. He was sitting up on his bed, pillows propped up behind his back, while Natasha leaned back on the chair she'd pulled up next to the foot of his bed, her legs crossed.

"You're down to enough painkillers to knock out a small bear, probably."

"I just want to get out of here, to be honest."

"The serum made you immune to freezer burn, not bullets, Cap," said Natasha. She was in her civvies, meaning she was off-duty, black leather jacket over a red blouse and jeans. She was slicing a couple of giant Fuji apples into a bowl. The sight of Natasha with a sharp, pointed object in her hand incited an immediate visceral reaction in Steve, but he managed to clamp down on the instinct before he did anything rash like scramble out of bed and accidentally reopen his stitches.

"Are you here to debrief me?"

"Not in any official capacity, no. I can tell you whatever you want to know though," she replied, popping one of the apple slices in her mouth with a sharp crunch.

Steve put a casual hand to his ribs, checking as he had every hour since they changed his bandages to see if he's bled through them yet. "I'm guessing everyone's alright?"

"The extraction went about as well as it could've with the exception of you bleeding your guts out on the floor of my quinjet and Tony nearly dying of hypothermia," Natasha replied with an eloquent arch of her eyebrow. "But yes, we achieved all mission objectives. Now that we have proof of Latveria selling weapons to terrorists, it'll be impossible for Doom to get the materials over the border, and HYDRA doesn't have the technological expertise to remake it themselves."

"That's...good," Steve said constructively.

"I could've done without all the bleeding, personally."

"I didn't do it on purpose," Steve protested. It's not like he wasn't inconvenienced by his own injuries. He grabbed one of the apple slices from the bowl and ate it in one bite.

"Maybe you weren't trying hard enough?" Natasha deadpanned.

Steve crossed his arms across his chest, which didn't do his ribs any favors, but he had a point to make. "Alright, so what happened after I inconsiderately bled all over the place?"

"Apology accepted," said Natasha. "Hawkeye and Agent Thirteen returned and joined the SHIELD auxiliary forces that came in after we left and rounded up what they could of HYDRA."

Steve frowned. "What about Madame Hydra?"

"Ophelia Sarkissian, alias Madame Hydra, escaped. But we destroyed their Madripoor branch, which was their main base of operations in the Southeast Asian region. Also, the whole objective of the mission was to prevent technological singularity from crippling civilization as we knew it." She brushed a lock of her red hair behind her ear and turned a tired smile at him. "So we did good, Steve."

Steve just grabbed another apple and tried not to let it nag at him. Natasha was right. They had been desperately lucky.

"Then you were in critical condition for the first twelve hours after we reached stateside. After the medics stabilized you, they moved you here."

"And then I was out for two straight days," said Steve flatly.

 _There's only so much your serum can do_ , was left unsaid as Natasha started cutting the second apple. She tossed the long ribbon of apple peel into the trashcan across the room.

There was one other something (someone) Natasha had pointedly not mentioned. Steve chewed on another slice thoughtfully, but as a pretty firm believer in the straightforward approach, he swallowed and said, "How's Tony?"

Natasha did that thing where her mouth curled a little, giving the impression that she was laughing at you without even smiling."Tony bribed the nurse to let him know when you're asleep or awake. He's probably coming by sometime tonight."

Steve thought of the blonde woman with the cheerful smile and strong hands who had changed his bandages earlier. "The nurse is a SHIELD agent, isn't she?"

Natasha shrugged. "Agent Morse's expertise is biology, but she has field medic experience, and she is also your level 7 security detail."

"And Tony has no idea you're telling me this."

"He seemed happy with his plan. It would have been rude to discourage him from it."

Steve sighed. "He's going to try to apologise, isn't he?"

"Most likely."

"I could pretend to be asleep."

"Sure. Want some apple?" Natasha asked. She finished cutting the last of the apple and set down the knife, and then held out a small slice.

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?"

"Say _ahhh_ ," she said, by way of affirmation.

*

Steve was bleeding on the floor of the quinjet. Tony was brittle with cold, the river seeped into his bones, his body shivering with it, and Steve was bleeding on the floor of the quinjet.

_Someone like you can't protect anyone._

He held Steve's body to him, cradling his head in his lap as Sharon stepped forward and put pressure on the gunshot on Steve's stomach. She pulled up the fabric of Steve's shirt up over his ribs, pressing a bandage to the wound, and the blood looked terribly red on her uniform.

_When have you ever been able to protect anything precious to you?_

The words rang loud and hollow in his brain, and there have been one too many assholes fucking around in his head lately. He wanted to claw the voice out, shout at it to leave him alone, but all he did was try to hold Steve to him tighter, try to give him as much of his meager warmth as he could.

Tony held Steve close, and in the vague delirium of hypothermia, one voice in his head spoke louder than all the others.

There was no fucking way they were taking this from him.

*

Steve woke up days later, pale, slightly trembling, to shake out the biting cold from his bones again, but he woke up. That was the important part that held the pieces together, and the constriction in Tony's chest loosened until he could breathe again, like that first gulp of air the moment they broke the surface of the river together.

*

There were times when conventional rules of social conduct were a nuisance to try to work around, since they tended to get in the way of having fun, or at least having fun without being sued for destruction of property and/or cited for public indecency. Tony took a certain amount of pride in having rid himself of as many extraneous standards of propriety as possible, which was just another entry in the long line of his great and incredibly well-thought out decisions.

By which he meant to say, he could've easily used the stealth Iron Man suit to sneak into the hospital and sit in the corner watching Steve, but that was rude and creepy and most likely a misuse of technology if there ever was one, so he didn't (even though he _could_ ).

Tony settled for bribing the blonde nurse to tell him when Steve would be unconscious, so he could go into his room to see how he was while he slept, which he would contend was commendably less creepy than Plan A.

He actually did have self-restraint (maybe), but self-restraint was for people who didn't have a Rhodey or a Pepper.

On the third day, the nurse told Tony that Steve had stabilised but was still mostly sedated, and so he'd resolved to visit him later that night, when he was assured that Steve would be asleep and he could sneak into the hospital without anyone recognising him.

Plan A would've only worked for three hundred seconds anyway.

He slipped into Steve's room as quietly as he could, the only source of light being the soft fluorescents near the windows and the battery in his chest. Steve was on the bed, asleep, looking just as he had been the last time Tony had seen him, days ago.

No, the bruise on his temple was faded almost entirely, just a brush of pale yellow left. His bandages were bright white, probably meaning that he was bleeding through them less and less.

 _Alright, you've seen him_. Tony closed his eyes and took a deep, quiet breath. _Time to leave_.

He stood in place, eyes still closed, as he listened to the beeping noise of the machines and the sound of Steve's breath. Then he made to turn in the direction of the door, when—

"I've been trying to count down the time until you realised I wasn't actually asleep."

Tony let out a small groan. He opened his eyes, still facing the door. "That's cheating."

"How so?" Steve asked, far too innocently.

"You're using spies," said Tony, before finally turning around. Steve was sitting upright in bed, hunched slightly forward, favoring his right side just a little. He looked fine, if tired, covered as he was in bandages and a couple days' worth of stubble.

Tony bit the inside of his cheek so that he wouldn't say anything more as he tried to disguise the relief coursing through him at seeing Steve just...okay. He was okay.

"The nurse you bribed to spy on me was a SHIELD agent, Tony," said Steve.

A look of surprise crossed Tony's face, before he gave a small laugh. He walked forward, and stood at Steve's right, setting his winter coat on the visitor's chair that was already pulled up beside the bed. "And she still took my money too."

"Are you getting any sleep?" Steve asked, after a pause.

"...Yes?" Tony hedged. He was normally okay with lying, it's just lying to Steve that he hated. Probably because it was practically treason, lying to Steve, or at least it felt like it. Lying to America while also kicking puppies and stealing handbags from old ladies.

Well, it was more a half-lie anyway. Or maybe sixty percent lie, seventy tops. The point was, he was only mostly lying, meaning that there was a truth in there somewhere and Steve could do all the searching if he really wanted to find it.

"Actual sleep, Tony. On a bed. Not the cot in your workshop, or 'I was so sleep deprived I found myself with my face in my bowl of cereal this morning'-sleep."

"...I wasn't eating cereal when it happened?"

"Tony."

"Toast is a whole different story."

"Tony," said Steve, and sometimes Tony hated just how quick he was to cut to the point. "You don't have to apologise for anything. I'm okay."

Something about the way his voice sounded vaguely exasperated, as if Tony was being ridiculous for worrying, made him narrow his eyes at Steve. He balled his hands into fists, tried to keep his voice level as much as he could. "You got gunned down in front of me, Steve. We didn't know if you were going to make it."

"I was lucky."

"That's the point! You could've been unlucky and I—" _would never have forgiven myself for it_ , he didn't manage to say, the words dying in his throat at the what-if.

"Tony—"

"You told me once, to think about why you care about me. How your reasons could be selfish." Tony looked up from where his eyes had travelled to his feet to look Steve straight in the eye. Steve's expression was soft and unbearably kind. "I don't think I need to tell you how selfish I can be," he said.

"I almost died," said Steve, before he smiled self-deprecatingly. "I have no illusions about that. And that seems to happen to us pretty often, because, well... hazards of the job, and all."

Steve leaned forward, and Tony thought no jury in the world could find him guilty for just gravitating towards him automatically, until Steve was close enough to extend his hand, splay his fngers on Tony's chest.

Tony had always thought that the people who ascribed physical description to emotional distress were just being needlessly maudlin, but at Steve's words, he was certain he could feel his heart pang with something indefinable, but suspiciously close to hope.

"Shouldn't we might as well be happy?" Steve asked.

"I can't promise anything. I'm terrible with promises, and I'm late to all my appointments, you can quote Pepper on that."

"I'm not asking for any promises. I'm okay, and we're both here," said Steve, and took Tony's hand in his. He looked thoughtfully at their entwined fingers, and in the dim lighting of the room, his eyes peered out like two bright points in the dark. "I don't want to miss out on one more good thing in my life. I've missed so many already."

Tony closed his eyes, and gripped Steve's hand tighter. "I'm still a terrible idea."

"Our terrible idea." Steve pulled Tony closer, until his mouth was pressing against his.

Tony didn't know how the next few minutes progressed, heady and light-headed, how his lips brushed with Steve's, hand on his jaw, eyes shut tight, to getting up on the bed, tie askew, fingers tangled in Steve's hair.

"Steve," Tony managed to say in the tragic moments when Steve's mouth wasn't on his, "you're still injured."

His words were mostly swallowed into Steve's mouth, and they had been rather weak protestations anyway, contradicted by the way Tony had his arms wrapped around Steve's neck and shoulders, the way his thighs straddled Steve as he knelt on the bed in front of him. His knees dug into the mattress on either side of Steve as the phrase 'tongue hockey' floated through his brain.

"No," Steve said, breaking the kiss and trailing his mouth down Tony's neck, warm hands firmly on Tony's hips. "I'm fine, this is fine—"

"Steve, I know neither of us is used to me being the voice of reason but we're on your _hospital bed_ —"

The words of protest died in an embarrassing whimper as Steve's mouth found his clavicle, teeth grazing slightly. Tony tightened his fingers in Steve's short hair as retaliation. "It's late at night and I'm not calling the nurse in if you won't," said Steve, sounding far too sensible as he spoke the words against Tony's throat.

"Jesus fucking christ," Tony panted, his entire brain feeling like the exposed, frayed ends of live wire. "You are just pulling out all the stops here."

His thumb traced Tony's hipbone to his waist, hiking Tony's shirt up and making his breath catch in his throat, an obvious and valiant attempt to kill Tony via oxygen deprivation. "I've been told I can be a bit stubborn sometimes."

Tony caught Steve's mouth in a kiss before it could do anything more insidious than moan, though Tony could attest that moaning was already dangerously insidious. Steve's lips were slightly chapped, Tony noticed, as he captured his bottom lip in his mouth. Someone's heartbeat was loud in his ears, and Tony would wager it was his, but it was hard to tell. _They breathed the same air_ , he thought hazily, _maybe they could share the same heartbeat_. Both of Steve's hands had moved up to curl around his waist, pressing into the small of his back and urging him forward.

And also, yes, that was Steve's erection pressing into his thigh. Tony wondered if this was what a brain aneurysm felt like.

"You know we're under SHIELD surveillance here," he said, his teeth gritted as Steve undid Tony's belt and pulled down his jeans and underwear.

"Nat can walk in at anytime and never let us live it down," replied Steve matter-of-factly. Tony's pretty sure Natasha felt bad for him, but not bad enough to interfere. And Tony couldn't really blame her. She never claimed to be a good person, people just made all these assumptions.

Steve spat into his hand, and then he wrapped his fingers around Tony's cock and began to stroke him, his pace slow and painfully languorous _—_

— _the left anterior cingulate cortex controlled the body's physiological responses,_   _simple neuron loops that produce affective responses to specific stimuli—_

 _—_ Tony was sure his brain winked out for a second there _—_

 _—bypassing the conscious brain to be as instantaneous as possible_ —

"—Don't be such a tease, R-rogers." Tony tried to muffle his moans by burying his face in Steve's neck. His thighs trembled with the effort of keeping himself mostly upright.

Tony felt a smirk curve against his neck, small and dangerous, and immediately knew that had been the wrong thing to say. Steve curled his hand around the head of Tony's dick, his thumb pushing against the slit. Tony groaned, and thrusted into Steve's tight grip, splaying his fingers on Steve's neck as he did so, locking his thumbs into the hollow above his clavicles before pushing Steve onto his back.

He rested on his elbows on top of Steve, trying not collapse on top of him entirely even as Steve flicked his wrist and sped up his strokes and generally did terrible things to his concentration. Someone had the foresight to pull up Steve's thin hospital gown, and Tony thought it had probably been him, but that must've required a higher level of brain function than he was capable of at the moment.

Still, Tony curled his fingers around the base of Steve's cock, stroking and pulling the foreskin over the head to elicit a sharp hiss of breath out of Steve. He was taking that as some form of victory.

Steve took his mouth in a kiss again, wet and agonisingly warm, and he moved his hand to grip their cocks together, his grip slick with spit and precome. Tony pistoned forward into his hand, grinding against him, and Tony's moans in his mouth reverberated through all of Steve, deep and almost pained in their intensity. His free hand was on Tony's hip again, directing his thrusts, and their shallow, panting breaths were indistinguishable in the half-dark of the room.

It hit Tony out of nowhere, and it was all he could manage to bite into Steve's shoulder, muffling his shout into Steve's skin as he came all over his hand. Steve continued to stroke him, Tony's nerve endings singing, even as Steve's own orgasm coursed through him, shuddering through his frame as he spilled on his stomach.

Neither of them moved in the moments after, quite possibly because neither of them were able to, but also because Tony's body was a comfortable weight on top of him.

After a moment, Tony stood up and made his way to the bathroom on slightly wobbling legs for a damp towel to wipe them both off as best he could, because both of them knew that this wasn't the best plan they both ever had, but this was probably the best plan they both ever had.

Then, Tony tossed the towel in the bin, and curled up next to Steve (on his right side, because Steve was still injured).

*

They fell asleep like that, and Tony left in the early morning after leaving a kiss on Steve's forehead. Steve, slightly groggy from a disoriented sleeping schedule and analgesic still flushing out of his system, only murmured something in response that made Tony tense up, curl his fingers in Steve's hand tightly.

Steve couldn't remember what it was he said though, and so he'd resolved to ask Tony about it when he came home.

Later, the nurse came in with a change of clothes and the paperwork saying that Steve was clear to go, and if she noticed the weird stains on the hospital gown she threw out, she was either too professional to say anything about it or Steve had been blushing too hard to notice.

*

Steve was released out of the hospital later that same day, and he'd have to wear crutches for a bit, but otherwise it was just a waiting game. A significant percentage of his surface area was either bruised or covered in bandages, but it wasn't anything he wouldn't be able to brush off in a couple of days, a week tops.

Still, SHIELD wasn't about to let HYDRA or AIM or some other villainous organization take advantage of this small window of opportunity to nab the Super Soldier serum's only successful specimen, but Steve was glad to see that the entourage they'd sent to pick him up wasn't a detail of stone-faced SHIELD agents.

The blonde nurse-slash-secret SHIELD agent took him to the entrance of the hospital in a wheelchair, where she'd handed him and his crutches off to a group of people he was only too happy to see.

"Steven!" shouted Thor in greeting, before taking him in a generously hearty hug that made him think to recheck his stitches at the first opportunity. Even in civilian clothing, Thor's presence was pretty conspicuous, but then again, their group was hardly ever going to blend in. With Thor, Sharon, Clint, Bruce, and now himself joining them, they made for a rather tall, and coincidentally very blond, group.

Clint nodded a small nod of hello at the blonde nurse, who returned it just as discretely before vanishing back into the hospital.

Steve turned to Thor first. "Thor! It's good to have you back."

"Aye, I feel quite similarly. I returned to Midgard last night, although I am sorry to say I did not return in time to aid you in your business with HYDRA," said Thor, looking genuinely remorseful that he hadn't been there to help. "You would not have been so grievously injured had I been fighting by your side."

"Hey, I think we did okay without you, big guy," said Steve good-naturedly.

"Indeed, you fought valiantly, even without the might of gods behind you!"

Steve turned to Bruce, before Thor could pound a dangerously comradely pat on his back. Bruce squeezed his shoulder reassuringly before saying, with a gesture to his mousy-brown hair, "You know, coming here, I didn't think we needed to be color-coded."

"Would you have dyed your hair, Dr. Banner?" asked Sharon with a wry smile as she hugged Steve next, with perhaps slightly less crushing force than Thor. "You would make for a very attractive blond."

Clint shuddered theatrically. "God, no. Can you imagine the Hulk with blonde hair?"

"It's worth a shot. Maybe the other guy might like the makeover," Bruce deadpanned.

Steve gave a small laugh."This is kind of overkill for picking me up, don't you think?" Every single one of them could level a city block without breaking a sweat, even Sharon ( _especially_ Sharon).

"I volunteered to pick you up. Thor, Agent Barton and Dr. Banner volunteered themselves as _my_ security detail."

"The rest of the Avengers are in the north of this city, fighting the yellow-clad men who resemble...you call them keepers of bees?" Thor said. "Otherwise, they would have joined us in welcoming you home."

"AIM is trying to turn the Upper West Side into a giant biosphere," said Bruce helpfully.

Steve raised a slightly alarmed eyebrow. "Are you sure we're not needed for that?"

Sharon shrugged. "The Helicarrier is hovering over Broadway and 116th street at the moment, dispersing the antidote Stark and Dr. Banner developed this morning. Natasha is leading a team on the ground to subdue their agents, with Iron Man as air support."

"They'll probably beat us back to the tower," said Bruce, looking at his wristwatch. Thor looked like he was weighing the merits of turning that into a formal challenge.

"Maybe you guys didn't think this plan all the way through," said Steve as they walked to the parking lot.

"How so?" said Sharon.

Steve gestured with one crutch to the SHIELD-issue flying car that made a beeping noise when Sharon took out her keys. "How are we all going to fit in the car?"

In the end, all the relatively normal humans rode in the flying car across midtown Manhattan while the Norse god flew beside them, which Steve bet had a good chance of being the weirdest sentence he would think for the day.

*

_I'm glad you stayed._

It was late at night when Tony flew in through the garage entrance to the tower, which despite being a lot more ground-level, was actually relatively inconspicuous, or as much as he's physically capable of the term. He just had to zoom in really fast and hope that bystanders would pass him off as a red-and-gold gust of wind.

The armor disassembled around him, and except for the weird viney plant that was way, _way_ too fond of him, taking care of AIM had been cakewalk, just a lot of drudgework and plant-zapping and clean-up that took hours.

He rolled his shoulders, and made his way to his workshop, only to find that it was already occupied.

"I, uhh, hi. Am I interrupting something?"

Three sets of curious eyes looked up at him. Steve turned the same time that Dummy and You rotated their mechanical arms/camera pieces at his direction. The three of them had been incredibly engrossed in Steve's sketchbook as he sat on the cot Tony kept down here, just drawing, a pair of crutches resting against the workbench.

Tony paused, before he took a deep breath and strode forward to sit next to Steve on the cot, the bots whirring to the side to make way for him. The drawing was of Dummy and You, of course, and, "Wow, how many drawings do you even have of them now?"

Steve smiled at him, a small but ridiculously happy smile that Tony was absolutely not endeared by, before he turned back to his drawing. Dummy and You returned to looking intently at page, following every motion of the charcoal. "Not a lot actually. Someone keeps going into my sketchbook and ripping all the pages with them on it."

Dummy innocently whirred away as though distracted, and Tony laughed. "I didn't program vanity into you, you heap of junk. This I would expect from JARVIS—"

"All creation are mirrors of its creator, sir," a cool voice interjected.

"—but give those back to Steve. Ask him nicely for a portrait next time." Tony gave Dummy a reprimanding pat on the head, and what happened to this AI that it could pout even as _just_ a robot arm?

"They can keep them," said Steve. "It's an excuse to draw them again."

Tony collapsed on his back on the springy cot, curling the scratchy duvet around him. 'You spoil them. You're a bad enabler and that's why they all think I'm the strict mom and you're the cool dad."

Steve set the charcoal and sketchbook on the workbench, and fell back next to him so that they were lying side by side, both of their knees hanging awkwardly off the foot of the bed. Steve brought one hand to Tony's face. "What does that make JARVIS?"

"The weird aunt who nags about how they're too thin and that they're doing badly in school," said Tony. Tony thought he should say something, about the color of Steve's eyes, or his ridiculous eyelashes, or the pale, barely-there freckles that he could only see because they were so close. There was hardly any distance between them, but all Tony could adequately register was the charcoal on Steve's fingers smudging on his cheek. He decidedly did not mind.

"I feel obligated to protest that descriptor," said JARVIS, and in the background was the whirring noise of the bots wheeling away, probably having plundered off with Steve's sketchbook.

"Duly noted, JARVIS," said Steve. When he kissed Tony's mouth this time, it's easy, languid, with none of last night's urgency and freneticism.

Steve's mouth was warm against his, and Tony curled a hand to his neck. This he could do, an apology he could make.

After a while, they broke the kiss, and spoke in quiet voices.

"I wanted to welcome you home," Steve said. " _We_ wanted to welcome you home."

"I didn't know you were gonna get let out right after I left," said Tony. "Kinda beat me to the punch."

"They discharged me early morning, said to get a lot of rest and sleep and let the serum do its job," said Steve with a shrug. "I'm okay with that."

"I—I'm sorry I left so quickly this morning. I just," Tony stammered, "Bruce called and Columbia had been turned into a jungle with very hostile plant-life, panicking college students everywhere, so I helped make an antidote and then that was that, really."

"It's fine. You wouldn't have fit in the flying car anyway."

Tony raised an eyebrow. "What, too good for the old hug-n-fly?"

Steve smiled an easy smile against Tony's neck as they continued to absolutely not cuddle next to each other. "It's hard not to make fun of that in hindsight, to be honest."

"I think we're doing this whole 'are we doing this' process all jumbled up."

"We have had a lot of interruptions," said Steve, his breath soft on Tony's lips. "Has any part of my intentions been unclear?" he asked, and Tony tried his best not to melt into a puddle of something embarrassing.

"Jesus, intentions make it sound like I'm a flower about to be debauched. Wait, it's the other way around, right? Oh wow, tell me I didn't debauch your flower, although okay, that would be kind of hot—"

Steve shook his head. "Why does everyone think all I did in the army was fight Nazis and get frozen?"

"Yeah, you also did a lot of singing and being spangly."

"You're really cute when you're dodging the question."

Tony rolled his eyes. "I—no, Steve, your intentions are very clear, and even if you could misconstrue the sex as being vague, you said this morning—"

"Right, about that," said Steve, his eyes widening in curiosity. "What did I say this morning?"

"I, uhh, wait, I take it back. 'Good morning, Tony?'"

"Tony—"

"'Tony you were the best lay of my life and we should do that again when my ribs aren't broken?'"

"Somehow I find that hard to believe."

"'Tony, you just rocked my world and I definitely won't ask you to repeat this when I'm coherent?'" he asked. Tony buried his face in the soft, blue cotton of Steve's shirt, which was large enough that it was loose even on Steve. It smelled nice, because it smelled like Steve, and not in a homemade-apple-pie-and-fireworks sort of way. Like if fresh water smelled like anything. Tony muffled his words into Steve's chest before his thoughts got any more maudlin.

"Fine. Tell me when you're ready," said Steve serenely, a careful hand around Tony's shoulder, pulling him closer.

"That's quite honestly the best idea you've had all night."

"But tell me soon. I'm not getting any younger."

"Haha, I love jokes about how old you are, how did you know?"

"Just a guess."

That second night they fell asleep on the cot together, the exhaustion of the past few days (weeks, _months_ ) settling to a tired dreamlessness, the faint blue wash of JARVIS' holograms warding off the dark.

(There are a lot of nights, many more after that, and the nightmares don't go away entirely, but on the nights when Tony does wake up, he lies there in the dark, Steve's hand on the small of his back, listening to the careful rise and fall of his breath. He goes back to sleep.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha, it's DONE, and the most I could say is at least it didn't take me a _whole_ year to finish this monster. I hope it was worth it, and thanks for reading!


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